Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. does not have a teacher crunch and is pretty close to fully staffed looking ahead to the 2022-23 school year, but that can’t be said for a lot of Indiana school systems.
As The Republic’s Andy East reported, BCSC has 33 openings systemwide out of 762 teachers when the school district is fully staffed. That’s manageable, local education officials said. While schools ideally strive to be 100% staffed on Day 1 of a new school year, most larger systems aim to be 90% staffed. BCSC is at 96%.
That seems to be the silver lining to a gathering cloud over public education in this state. As East reported, Indiana’s teacher shortage is becoming much more pronounced at a time when there are more than 2,500 teaching vacancies in public schools statewide.
And even though BCSC has pretty close to a full complement of educators, administrators are beginning to see the effects of our state’s teacher shortage when filling open positions.
“Our pool of candidates is not deep and it’s not diverse. That’s where the concern comes from,” BCSC assistant superintendent of human resources Gina Pleak said. “… Over 25 years ago, when I was applying for a teaching job, I think there were probably over 100 candidates for a position. We are at the point now it’s probably less than 10 — if we get that. It’s about five, probably, for an open position.”
Every indication is this problem will worsen in the future. Significantly fewer college students are enrolling in education programs while the number of licensed teachers leaving the profession has been increasing.
Teacher pay and school funding have always been issues, and to say these have not kept pace with economic trends is an understatement. That’s true nationwide, but Indiana has truly fallen behind.
Indiana’s average teacher pay is $53,072, which ranks 41st out of 50 states, according to the National Education Association. It’s important to note that this is the average for all teachers, from first-year educators to those with decades of experience. NEA reports that the average starting teacher salary in Indiana is just over $38,000.
Low pay does nothing to ensure that our children are getting the best education we can afford to provide them, especially when the Indiana General Assembly is sitting on billions of dollars of surplus tax money. We can afford to do much better by our children. The question is, will we?
Gov. Eric Holcomb has had on his desk for going on two years a report he asked for on the state of teacher compensation in Indiana. It recommended, among other things, raising average Indiana teacher pay to $60,000. Despite some slight increases since then, educators remain woefully undercompensated in our state.
And it doesn’t help when fractious politicians try to muzzle teachers, as we saw earlier this year. We’ve said before that teachers deserve more respect than we tend to show them in Indiana. Respect doesn’t begin and end with a paycheck, but money does matter, especially when teachers must invest so much in their own educations.
The fact is, we will always need dedicated teachers. As a state, we should be doing our homework to learn how we can encourage more people to join an essential profession.
