A high number of teachers are leaving the Haines school system this year. And replacing them will likely be difficult. KHNS’s Alain d’Epremesnil spoke with the school district’s superintendent about the causes and implication of this turnover.
The Haines school is losing teachers. And Superintendent Roy Getchell is concerned.
Getchell: “So you know right now I’m aware of four or five openings.”
That’s out of a total of twenty five. In other words, about 20 percent of teaching staff.
Getchell: “And then we still have an assistant principal opening that we just didn’t fill.”
This is part of a nationwide trend. According to a study from Arizona State University, 8% of teachers leave the profession every year, and another 8% leave for another school.
The consequences are multiple. The new teachers are often less experienced. Sometimes schools increase class size to make up for numbers. All this hurts student learning. The effect is strongest when a teacher leaves in the middle of the year. Another study from the University of Florida – found that when a teacher leaves during the school year, student progress is set back many weeks.
Although the effects of teacher turnover are known, preventing it is more complicated. In Haines, there are multiple causes, says Getchell.
Getchell: “I’ve got a teacher that’s retiring, there is a variety of reasons but one of those is just access in and out of Haines, things that we’ve talked about and that we know about living here.”
During COVID, many people stayed put and didn’t make major life transitions. Staff retention remained high. A number of teachers may have been waiting for the pandemic to wane before relocating, and now they’re making their move.
Getchell says finding new teachers is hard:
Getchell: “I think we are looking at just the perfect storm, and it started, I don’t know, ten years ago, when I started noticing a shocking decrease in the number of people that were going into education. So the job fairs that used to have hundreds of thousands of people in them, suddenly would have in the tens.”
Recruiting into the profession is another issue. According to an article from the Pew Research Center, the number of college students majoring in education has dropped by half in the last fifty years. Here again the causes are multiple. Salaries may be one.
When asked if a teacher’s pay is enough to raise a family, Getchell responded:
Getchell: “Oh that’d be difficult, truthfully, to do it alone? I guess sit depends where you are in that salary scale and spectrum, but when you look at the cost of housing, the cost of everything, and it’s gone up so much that it’s really difficult. I mean people absolutely do it and I’m thankful that they do, but it just requires a lot no matter where they live.”
In Alaska, the teaching profession has been made less attractive by the diminishing quality of retirement packages, according to Getchell. He says the more traditional pension that the state was providing brought a lot of teachers to Alaska. But that’s been downgraded to a 401k account.
Getchell: “It is, I believe, the only one of its kind in the country. I don’t think it’s serving Alaska very well in keeping teachers in state. In fact in some ways I think it almost encourages the other way. Whereas if you are deeply in a pension somewhere else in the state that offers it, you really have to think hard about leaving, you know, because with that you take a lot of years and things with you, and potential income away. So it’s an incentive for states that have that kind of pension, it’s an incentive to keep people in state. And we don’t have that right now.
When it comes to recruitment, Getchell says he is open to finding good teachers wherever they are.
Getchell: “We are going to continue doing the things that we’ve done before, hopefully we’ll be able to be an attractive place for teachers within Alaska to come, and we’ll look at those avenues through our Alaska teacher placement, through the university system. But we are going to cast a wide net, I’ve been in contact with recruitment agencies in this country but then outside as well.”
He cites some remote rural communities where most teachers come from abroad, notably the Philippines.
Getchell: “What we want to do is put the best people in front of our children and if those teachers are not from the US we will find a way to get the best people here. Hopefully we can fill everything from within state, from within our own country, but if not, we are not going to wait around. Because we are going to be ready on day one, with quality teachers in all of our classrooms.”
Despite the challenges, Getchell is optimistic when he looks at the students he works with.
Getchell: “You know I look at those last few graduating classes that we had here in Haines, we’ve got really good students that are going to go into education. And that is a trend that I hadn’t seen until the last two or three years as far as the numbers go. It seems like there is a higher interest. So I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, because we have some really great students that we hope will graduate, make a difference for children, and hopefully they’ll be doing that in Haines one day. So, I’ll leave you with that.”
