McHenry County schools districts look for ways to attract more teachers amid statewide shortages

Sunita Andrysiak wanted to become a teacher, but working a full-time job and supporting a family made it impossible for her to go back to school for education in the traditional way.

Instead, she found a new teacher residency program through Aurora University and Woodstock Community Unit School District 200 where she now gets to teach 5th-grade dual language English literacy at Prairiewood Elementary School.

The residency program at Woodstock District 200 is in its first year with nine teacher residents, who will earn their teaching credentials through Aurora University, according to a news release from District 200.

“This program has made the transition to becoming an educator more attainable, because it is different from the traditional route a person would have to take in order to get their teaching license,” she said.

The program is designed to “merge the gap” between young professionals who may need support in entering the field and school districts that are desperate to find qualified candidates to fill open positions amid worsening teacher shortages across the state, according to the release.

“A growing number of seasoned educators are retiring, and fewer people are choosing to enroll in teacher preparation programs at the university level,” Keely Krueger, District 200 assistant superintendent for early childhood and elementary education, said in a written statement Wednesday.

The 2020 Illinois Educator Shortage Study by the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools, shows that 55% of responding superintendents in the northeast region - McHenry, Lake, DuPage, Kane, Will, Grundy and Kendall counties - believe there is a teacher shortage problem and 72% believe the substitute teacher problem is worse than five years ago.

Among superintendents statewide, these percentages are 77% and 93%, respectively.

[ Survey: Teacher shortage worsening for most Illinois districts ]

The most pressing issue is finding substitute teachers, particularly on short notice or in cases when technological experience is needed to teach students remotely, McHenry County Regional Superintendent of Schools Leslie Schermerhorn said last week. The McHenry County Regional Office of Education’s portal of substitute teachers has declined significantly in 2020, she said.

“Many are retired teachers who do not want to expose themselves to the pandemic, so they are not making themselves available at this time,” she said.

Many full-time teachers who are older or immunocompromised have also retired early or taken a leave of absence to protect themselves from the virus, Schermerhorn said.

COVID-19 sharpened the learning curve for new teachers, presenting a challenge to retention rates, Algonquin-based Community Unit School District 300 Superintendent Fred Heid said in a written statement Thursday.

“Historically, novice educators could rely on their peers and colleagues for guidance and coaching on-site and in real-time,” Heid said. “The current remote setting tends to isolate those new to the profession, making the transition even more difficult for them.”

Just as these factors have reduced available staff, social distancing guidelines have forced schools to reduce class sizes meaning they need more teachers to staff each of those classrooms, Schermerhorn said.

Kane County Regional Superintendent Patricia Dal Santo said the same trends are present there.

The survey’s results show location as one of the biggest indicators for how much Illinois school districts struggle in finding substitute teachers and filling openings, with rural districts often having more trouble.

Harvard School District 50, a predominately rural district, has struggled to fill open positions as candidate pools shrink, Superintendent Corey Tafoya said.

“It is very alarming,” he said. When a position opens, they are seeing about a quarter of the number of applicants they used to get five or 10 years ago.

District 50 also has the added challenge of finding and retaining bilingual educators, Tafoya said.

About 69% of their student population is Hispanic and 37% are English learners, according to Illinois State Board of Education data.

Huntley Community School District 158 has relied on student teachers as a means of filling some gaps and also as a recruitment tool in a year when most recruitment fairs have been cancelled, the district’s assistant superintendent of human resources, Adam Zehr, said in an interview last week.

District 158 has specifically struggled to find dual language, foreign language and special education teachers, as well as science and math teachers at the high school level, Zehr said. Beyond just teachers, they have also seen shortages in school psychologists and speech language therapists.

Heid and Tafoya agreed with Zehr that these are the hardest areas to hire for.

[ Educator shortages a problem in McHenry, Kendall, Kane, Grundy, Will counties but worse statewide ]

As these positions go unfilled, some teachers have taken on “overloads,” meaning they forfeit their planning period to teach an extra period instead, Zehr said. When this fails, the district has to look to an outside staffing agency, which ends up being more expensive.

Tafoya points to a few factors that he thinks have led to a decline in the number of college students choosing to become educators.

First, “the price of this education is just going up and up and up, but yet salaries aren’t necessarily escalating at that same price so a lot of our new teachers come to us with a great deal of debt,” Tafoya said, a sentiment echoed by Heid and Zehr.

Being a rural, low-income district, District 50 does not boast the highest paid educators in the county by any means, but they are working to make their salaries and benefits competitive with other districts, Tafoya said.

“In a district like ours, we can also offer things like loan forgiveness for teachers because we are a high poverty district,” he said.

The second reason is that teachers are subject to harsh criticism by members of their community and, especially in the world of COVID-19, often are not seen in a favorable light, Tafoya said.

“It’s pretty easy to bash educators lately, it would seem,” he said. “We’ve kind of made it a less-than-appealing profession for our youngsters.”

“Teachers are not ... respected, whether monetarily or otherwise, as much as someone in another profession with the same amount of education,” Schermerhorn said.

Teaching used to be a profession people would go into, thinking they would stay in the career for their lifetime, Kane County’s Dal Santo said.

“Now we have teachers that leave before five years and move into other areas,” she said. “It can be an overwhelming job.”

The third reason cited by Tafoya is the licensing and certification that teachers need to be able to teach in Illinois. Teachers from other states need to get an additional license in order to teacher in the state, which can be cumbersome and expensive, he said.

Moving forward, teachers need more support in the form of tuition reimbursement, teacher-specific grants, and partnerships between colleges and school districts, Heid said. The education field also needs to freshen up its marketing of the profession, he said.

Tafoya said he is unsure whether the trials and tribulations of the last year will scare more people away or rally young professionals around the importance of education. He said he is hoping for the latter.

“Education is one of the most important functions of our democracy,” he said. “We have to make sure that we’re really taking care to teach our future voters, future employees, about how to function in our society.”