Washington school board addresses teacher shortage

The Washington school board approved a teacher shortage incentive program at a special meeting Friday morning, authorizing the superintendent’s discretion to offer $5,000 of incentive pay to new hires in state teacher shortage areas.

“We’re losing people because other districts are doing it, and we’re not able to meet that,” Stone said at the meeting. “I don’t necessarily like to play keeping up with the Joneses, but in this, we have multiple special ed positions open right now … we’re struggling to find people.”

Stone pointed to evidence that incentive pay was deterring applicants in the district.

“We’re losing people applying because other districts are already offering the incentives, so they don’t apply here because we haven’t been offering that.” he said. “We’ve had people pull their names from here and get hired there, so, yes, there is evidence.”

Stone said $5,000 was the going rate for teacher incentives in the area, and said the time period for paying the incentive was tailored to balance benefits with retention.

“For the amount we’re doing, it’s enough of an incentive over two years, if you do it over three years it’s not enough of an incentive,” Stone said. “(We) try to build relationships with them and continue to build the culture in our buildings, so that this is a place where they want to stay.”

Stone said the district was especially struggling to find applicants for special education positions, a trend that matches statewide patterns. Of the 21 positions available on the district’s job board, 11 were in shortage areas. Of those, nine were special education positions.

“Iowa has different special education endorsements, different special education licenses,” state Department of Education administrative consultant Larry Bice said. “In total, our shortages cannot be more than 5% of our total future population. The special education shortages alone will make up between 3% and 3.5% of those total teachers, so it’s really a large number.”

While the shortage areas are based on statewide data, Bice said rural communities were disproportionately impacted.

“On average, if you lived in a district where the student population is greater than, 10,000 … for every position advertised, there were about 59 applicants,” he said. “Between 1,000 and 10,000 it’s about 15 (or) 16.”

Washington enrolls 1,720 students districtwide, according to the district website.

The issue is complicated by a lack of usable data. Bice said the state was transitioning from one data collection program to another, and considers most of its old data obsolete or incomplete, with usable numbers not expected to surface for at least a year. As a result, the department hesitates to endorse any causes or solutions for the problem.

The motion by the Washington school board was approved unanimously.