New Braunfels Edition | September 2024

BY HANNAH NORTON

were about 24 recommendations in there. A lot of them focused on salary; a lot focused on training and retention of teachers. School districts are struggling to find certified teachers. In the 2022-23 school year, approxi- mately 15,300 teachers were hired in Texas with- out certification. That’s a drastic increase, about a 650% increase, from 2010. And it’s especially acute in rural and small towns, where nearly 75% of teachers were uncertified. Research shows [hiring uncertified teachers] can have negative consequences on academic achieve- ment. If you have a new teacher that doesn’t have the skills to be ready on day one, obviously your kids aren’t going to be achieving where you want them to be. It’s also causing high turnover. Only about 37% of uncertified teachers are still teaching after five years.

the post-pandemic student achievement loss has gone away. There’s still a lot of programs that are in place to help students with their academic progress that school districts would like to con- tinue, but because that federal stimulus funding is going away, it may not be available to them. In addition to those two major driving factors, there are some school districts out there experi- encing enrollment decline. Think of it this way: if every student draws down about $10,000 to pay for teachers, and you lose 10 kids, that is $100,000 that the school district doesn’t have to pay for a teacher salary. But you still have to have a teacher in the classroom, and you still have to have a bus driver, and you still have to be able to turn the lights and the air conditioning on. So those are big, kind of fixed costs that a school district doesn’t necessarily control. What kind of staffing issues are schools facing, and what can the state do to help? The state needs to implement a lot of the recom- mendations that came from the Teacher Vacancy Task Force report that was issued last year. There

Per-student spending On average, Texas public school districts spent $13,109 per student for the 2022-23 school year. Texas ranks 44th for per-student expenditures out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Arkansas

$13,516

#42

Alabama

$13,484

#43

Texas

$13,109

#44

Arizona

$12,837

#45

Florida

$12,815

#46

Tennessee

$12,476

#47

Nevada

$12,246

#48

Oklahoma

$11,928

#49

Utah

$11,146

#50

#51 Idaho

$9,808

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version, visit communityimpact.com .

The national average for per-student expenditures is $17,493 annually.

SOURCE: NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION/COMMUNITY IMPACT

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