By Robert Kittle
School is just about over for this school year, but districts across South Carolina are trying to fill vacancies that will determine who’ll be teaching your children this fall. About half the districts in South Carolina were at the state’s largest teacher recruitment fair Friday at the State Fairgrounds in Columbia, talking to about 500 candidates.
The scope of the teacher shortage may surprise you. Last year, almost 5,300 teachers left their classrooms in South Carolina, while the state turned out only about 2,200 new college graduates going into teaching.
“It’s, in a way, filling a bucket where there’s a hole in it and it continues to drain,” says Todd Scholl, with the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention and Advancement. “And at CERRA, what we’re trying to do is not only to fill that bucket but to repair the hole in the bucket.”
He says it’s doing that through numerous programs, including: a middle school program to encourage children to think about a career in teaching; the teacher cadet program in high schools, that exposes students to teaching and gives them college credit; a teaching fellows program in colleges that gives students leadership skills and professional development; and a mentoring program that matches veteran teachers with those just starting out, since the state loses a lot of teachers within their first five years.
The top reasons teachers are leaving are: 1. Personal choice—staying home with children, choosing not to work, or no reason given; 2. Taking a teaching job in another district; 3. Retirement.
Another program in place to help fill the vacancies is PACE, the Program of Alternative Certification for Educators, which recruits people who have college degrees in areas other than education and have worked in those fields but now want to teach. Gabriel Glenn of Gray Court in Laurens County just got his teaching certificate two weeks ago through PACE. “Used to work in government jobs and in industry jobs in poultry science, actually,” he says.
But it was an internship through Clemson, teaching at Liberty High, that got him interested in becoming a biology teacher.
He’s not worried about the number of teachers leaving the profession that he’s entering. “Well, that certainly shows that it is high demand, and so that does give me, really, excitement. I’m finally in an industry that is in high demand,” he says.
During the 2013-2014 school year, teacher turnover ranged from a low of 4.7 percent in York District 2 to 30.3 percent in Hampton District 2. You can see all districts’ turnover rates here.
