Florida teacher shortage hitting record high as students adjust to new school year
TAMPA, Fla. - As students get adjusted to their new classrooms they may notice more substitutes and larger class sizes this year. That's because Florida's teacher shortage is hitting a record high.
Florida Education Association President Andrew Spar says right now there's more than 7,000 vacancies for teachers and support staff across the state. That's higher than the 52,000 vacancies in January. Spar says that number may continue to get higher if major changes at the state-level aren't made.
Pay and politics are the two biggest factors turning teachers away from the classroom according to Spar.
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"This is an issue we need to deal with. It's an issue we've been calling on the governor and the legislature to deal with for quite some time, and essentially they've done nothing," Spar said.
Out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Florida has one of the lowest average teacher salaries ranking 48th with an average yearly salary of $51,000, according to data from the National Education Association.
"We have a constitutional obligation in the state of Florida to ensure that every child gets a high quality education. It is the paramount duty of this state to provide that high quality education and Florida right now is not achieving that level," Spar said.
Also contributing to the shortage, Spar says, are newly passed laws like the Parental Rights in Education Bill and the Stop WOKE Act which forced the Florida Board of Education to approve a revised Black history curriculum. As Spar explains it can make it difficult to discuss current events in say social studies.
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"Teachers are saying, look, I don't even know if I can talk about a shooting that happened in Jacksonville and how it was race related or the fact that we have people who are neo-Nazis in Orlando. We don't know if we can talk about those things without running afoul of the law and yet those are important issues that students see on the news or see on social media and really want to discuss," Spar said.
Going forward Spar believes more parents need to put pressure on state and local officials to take action.
"As parents, I think we have to start picking up the phone. We have to call superintendents and school board members. We have to call the governor's office and the commissioner of education's office and tell them that it's not okay, that we don't have fully certified credentialed teachers in all of our classrooms," Spar said.
In response to the number of staff vacancies, Governor DeSantis' press secretary Bryan Griffin issued a statement:
"Florida has 185,000 teachers and the state's vacancies represented (in September—and hiring has continued) approximately 2.4 percent of teaching positions, around 1.2 open positions per school on average. This does not reflect a 'struggle to hire and retain teachers."