Shortage of 100 teachers is hard lesson

More than a month after the start of the school year, Seattle Public Schools officials are still scrambling to fill 100 openings for permanent classroom teachers.

The situation is most critical in special-education classes for students with disabilities, which account for nearly a fourth of the openings, said William Bleakney, the district's human resources director. The other vacancies are scattered across various subject areas.

Substitute teachers are covering the affected classes.

The Seattle shortfall echoes a nationwide shortage of teachers, although other parts of the country have been squeezed tighter. Locally, Kent, with an enrollment about half of Seattle's 47,000 students, reports 16 openings yet unfilled. The Lake Washington and Bellevue districts are virtually 100 percent staffed.

The Seattle district has hired 75 more teachers for 2001-02 than in the year before, for a total of 675 newcomers, Bleakney said.

About 35 of those hires became necessary because of class-size reductions financed through the approval of ballot Initiative 728 last November. But the vast majority are because of a surge in retirements, resignations and leaves of absence, Bleakney said.

With 3,754 full-time certified teachers and administrators on the Seattle district's payroll, the number of openings can change daily.

"It's always a moving target because we continue to get turnover," Bleakney said.

Administrators continue to explore other options for dealing with the ongoing shortage. Among them:

Emergency substitutes. The state allows school districts facing staffing crises to hire substitute teachers lacking the normal credentials. So far this school year, Seattle has hired about 35 emergency substitutes, but the total likely will rise to 100, the amount permitted under an agreement with the Seattle Education Association, Bleakney said.

"Retire-rehire." The Legislature this year changed the law to allow some long-term teachers to retire and return to work after a hiatus as short as a month, without jeopardizing their retirement benefits. Seattle counts 17 current teachers in that category, and Bleakney expects the number to increase.

Conditional certification. Another wrinkle in state regulations allows districts to fill job slots for which no qualified candidates are at hand with applicants who possess some expertise in the subject area, but aren't certified teachers.


	Dr. Paula Zook, working as a biology and ecology teacher at Garfield High School, will spend one year in the classroom while she waits for her medical residency program to begin. Meryl Schenker / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

Seattle has so far proposed two teachers for conditional certification: Janie Wallace, for behavior-disorder special-education classes; and Dr. Paula Zook, a physician between internship and residency who is teaching biology and ecology for a year at Garfield High.

"I'm having a blast," Zook, 30, said yesterday. "The kids are wonderful." A Garfield alumna long interested in teaching, she learned about the conditional certification program from the school district's Web site.

Statewide, the number of conditional certifications is growing, but it's still in the range of 100 to 200, compared with 60,000 certified teachers, said Rick Maloney, certification director for the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. The number of emergency substitutes has risen much faster, increasing about 60 percent a year for several years, for a total of 1,300 in the last school year.

The pattern is continuing in the current school year.

In parts of the country most deeply affected by the shortage, up to 25 percent of classroom teachers are not certified in their areas of instruction, Maloney said.

In Washington, the rate is below 1 percent, he said.

"What has hit Washington is a substitute shortage," he said. "And we anticipate that what has hit elsewhere is coming. Every year, there are fewer and fewer applicants."

Help is on the way. The Legislature last spring appropriated $2 million over two years to pay non-teaching school employees and others as teaching interns while they earn college credits for certification. Yesterday, the state announced it will receive $1.2 million from the federal government to complement that alternative certification program.

In the interim, school personnel officials struggle to balance educational standards and staffing needs.

In Seattle, Bleakney said, it still takes more than a certificate and a heartbeat to get hired.

"When you get to the bottom of the applicant pool, you're dealing with people who maybe haven't been able to get a job, and there are some reasons for that," he said.

In some cases, that can mean making do with a substitute instead of hiring a technically qualified, but questionable, applicant.

"I would rather continue to look," Bleakney said.

P-I reporter Gregory Roberts can be reached at 206-448-8022 or gregoryroberts@seattlepi.com

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