President Joe Biden’s American Families Plan includes $9 billion to address the shortage, providing funding to train, equip and diversify the nation’s teachers.

_{by Adam Edelman for NBC News, June 6, 2021}

It wasn’t so long ago that Charles Prijatelj, the superintendent of the Altoona Area School District, was receiving up to 150 applications for elementary school teacher job openings.

In recent years, however, the number of applicants for each opening at his 7,400-student district in central Pennsylvania has dwindled to as little as three or four.

“There just aren’t enough teachers. There isn’t a big pool to pull from. Retirements are through the roof and people are leaving the profession even more than they were due to all the havoc from Covid,” Prijatelj told NBC News. “It’s dire.”

The decline Prijatelj has seen in his district mirrors a national trend, according to federal data and analysis of that data. And as President Joe Biden pitches universal preschool and free community college as part of his plans to overhaul a coronavirus-ravaged economy, education experts see teachers as the linchpin. The $9 billion that Biden’s American Families Plan would set aside to address the country’s increasingly acute shortage — one that was worsened, though not created by, the pandemic — represents a critical investment for the White House to make good on many other parts of his domestic agenda, these experts said.

“If you think about it, what is education? It’s teaching. You have to have a teacher to do the teaching. You can’t get anything else done without a teacher in the classroom,” said Georgia Heyward, a research analyst at the Center for Reinventing Public Education, an education policy analysis center at the University of Washington Bothell.

Click here to read the full article from NBC News.

TRIGroup’s Advice:

Work with the HR department to gather and analyze the data in your local district.

Identify the subject matter and grade level assignments that are already difficult to staff. Project how retirements and resignations may have short- and long-term affects. Contact your local teacher preparation programs and invite them into your district for student teacher placements. If your district includes high schools, consider the Career Technical Education strand of Education and start preparing future teachers to come from your own classrooms.

Finally, get smarter about the CA State trends. The Learning Policy Institute offers an interactive map HERE.