By Madison Brown
Fredericksburg Today
This story was edited to add a statement from Spotsylvania County Public Schools.
Spotsylvania students started school earlier this month with a shortage of fully licensed teachers. In its July meeting, the School Board reported 144 teaching positions vacant, up from 114 open positions at the same time last year. The official vacancy rate obscures 60 additional positions that were reclassified from fully licensed teaching positions to interim positions with no license or degree requirement, according to Board member Nicole Cole.
The remaining positions that were not filled between July 24 and August 9 can be covered by interim teachers and long-term substitutes, increased class sizes, or a virtual learning platform introduced last year which allows one teacher to instruct two classrooms at once.
Superintendent Mark Taylor reported in an August 14 School Board meeting that Spotsylvania’s 29 schools had an average of 2.2 vacancies. He did not share how many positions were covered by non licensed instructors.
Teacher vacancies are nothing new to the area, and come in the context of a national teacher shortage last year. Vacancies tend to be concentrated in certain subject areas, like STEM and special education, and in certain school districts.
Nationally, school districts are being hit by declining enrollment in teacher preparatory programs which reduces the pool of new teachers to recruit. A few districts, including Spotsylvania, also struggle to retain teachers. Some schools in the county experience up to a third of their staff leaving each year.
Data from the Virginia Department of Education show that Spotsylvania had nearly twice the proportion of unfilled full-time instructional positions as the state average during the 2022-2023 school year, with 7.6% of positions unfilled compared to 3.8% statewide. Two other nearby suburban districts, Stafford and Hanover, had 2.8% and .6% of their teaching positions vacant respectively.
Special education students and those from high-need schools are hit the hardest
Teacher vacancies are not equally distributed across the county. Zach Short, who works as Freedom Middle School’s chorus teacher, says that his school is fully staffed, with the exception of an autism resource teaching position.
“Even then, that puts us at the minimum staffing. The other buildings have long-term subs, who I think deserve all the credit in the world,” he said. “It’s important to note that there are vacancies. We’ve seen these positions either go from teacher to parent position or para to interim teacher position. And even then, we have still a mass absence of those teachers.”
Spotsylvania also had some of the state’s highest-needs schools in the 2022-23 school year, with Chancellor High reporting 18.8% of full-time positions left vacant, Harrison Road Elementary at 17.7%, and Salem Elementary at 20%. These three schools also have among the highest proportion of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch in the district, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Missy Spears is a former Spotsylvania teacher who taught for three years at Chancellor High before transferring to a middle school in the district. “At Chancellor, the year that I left, we lost a third of our staff,” she said.
Some teaching positions are being covered by paraeducators, who normally provide classroom aid, administrative support, and one-on-one supervision or tutoring for students, particularly those in special education programs.
“Paras make the world go round in an education system,” said Belén Rodas, who worked as a dance therapist for the county until the end of the last school year. “But when you have special education classrooms with no licensed teachers that are being taught by paras, when there were students who didn’t have speech therapy for a month out of the year because we couldn’t staff speech therapy positions… Those students started to pay the price first.”
Spotsylvania also struggles to fill all of its paraeducator positions, a problem that Rodas says it has had at least since she started as an intern in 2016.
As a result, special education students have already been facing the negative consequences of this teaching shortage for years. “I largely worked with nonverbal students, and I think they are our most vulnerable students. When things start to go off the rails, our most vulnerable students always start to pay the price first,” said Rodas. “Gen Ed students most of the time are insulated from the chaos in terms of their day-to-day experience. Thus far, I think this year will be different, maybe last year started to be really different [for them.]”
Pay is only part of the problem
Low pay is a frequently cited reason for teacher turnover nationwide. In Virginia, teachers make 32.7% less than college educated workers in other professions, per an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
Spotsylvania has historically lost teachers to northern counties with better pay. Spears, who taught for four years in two Spotsylvania schools, left the county this year to take a better-paying position in Loudoun County.
“I have a daughter who is in her first year of college, and I had to have seven streams of income in order to make ends meet,” she said. “It’s exhausting.”
The county implemented a raise last year, which School Board member Rabih Abuismail described at the time as “a first step to get the ball rolling.”
While the School Board is interested in increasing pay, the resources aren’t always available to do so. Spotsylvania’s Board of Supervisors allocated the school district only $9.4 million of the $22 million funding increase Supervisor Mark Taylor requested for fiscal year 2024.
“We have members on the Board of Supervisors who have been basically systematically defunding our schools for their own, I believe, partisan ideological reasons,” said Cole. “And they’ve been defunding our school system and not meeting our budget needs for the past 10-12 years now.”
But, Rodas says, Spotsylvania teachers have always known that they would receive better pay in neighboring districts. Spears was the only teacher who talked to FredToday that cited pay as her main reason for leaving.
Additionally, Spotsylvania’s exodus includes many mid- to late- career teachers, who receive much higher compensation. They often have to give up benefits or delay their retirement when they leave, and may take a pay cut if they transfer to a district that puts them at a lower step than they had been in Spotsylvania.
“I think you can treat your staff badly, or you can pay them badly, right?” said Rodas. “But if you do them both, people leave. That’s what we’ve seen. When we got paid poorly relative to other districts, but we had supportive leadership and were respected and treated well, people stayed, even though the pay was poor.”
Local politics is worsening teacher turnover
Teachers who leave Spotsylvania don’t always want to do so.
In Rodas’ case, she would have stayed employed by the district. “It was literally my dream job,” she said. “I loved the community, I loved the schools, and I was going to work in that job till I retired.”
She quit to run for School Board herself, although she said she decided to do so only after nobody else stepped up to run. “When we had the new School Board and the new Superintendent took place, people started to be treated very disrespectfully, even hostilely,” she said. “People are honestly scared for their jobs.”
Several outspoken teachers have been involuntarily transferred in the county with short notice.
One of the transferred teachers, Heather Drane, serves as vice president of the Spotsylvania Education Association. She was given a contract on the last possible day and transferred from a core to specialist position immediately after accepting it. Cole says the district is refusing to release Drane from her contract until they find a reading specialist to replace her. “I feel she was abused and put in an untenable position on purpose,” Cole said, “and simply because she is an outspoken advocate for the students and teachers in our school division.”
At the August 14 meeting, Drane addressed her situation to the Board during public comment. “This has become a toxic environment for every educator, including myself,” she said. “And that is why I’ve asked you to release me from my contract.”
Drane is one of a growing number of Spotsylvania teachers who have been coming to School Board meetings to denounce the Board’s influence in their workplace.
“This division has become toxic,” said Terri Steidl, a 17-year veteran teacher who left her position in June. “The name calling and insulting comments made about faculty, teachers, and students are some of the reasons that people are leaving.”
Short, who has also addressed the Board at meetings, explained that political turmoil at the upper level trickles down to each of the schools. “There’s almost a sense of fear amongst the inner leadership in our division right now,” he said. “It’s starting to play a part into how supported we are as staff and teachers.”
He said that administrators have started teaching in classrooms again, both to ensure all classes are covered and “for a reprieve from some of the stuff that they’ve been dealing with.”
“You’ve got a group that claims parents rights, but there’s a lot of gray area now and there hasn’t been a real direction of clarity. I’m all about parents’ rights too. But when we don’t have any direction or clarity from the top down, and whenever something’s brought up or challenged and it’s primarily siding with the parent, it creates that sense of uneasiness.”
Teachers propose simple solutions
Rodas believes Spotsylvania’s solution is simple. “People [are] treated very disrespectfully. I think if we fix that, we can probably keep most of our staff, and that’s free. We just have to have leaders who want to support our educators and who value our educators and value their expertise and their experience and their knowledge. Getting more teachers back, I think, will take fixing both leadership and pay.”
Spears said that to improve Spotsylvania’s retention, educators need more support from administration and central office to deal with increasing student behavior problems since COVID-19, including a few days’ training for new teachers who are career switchers. “They’re going to be put into the classroom with no classroom management and no background in differentiating instruction,” she said. “I have no doubt that these people are gonna try their best. But I also have no doubt that they’re not going to know what they don’t know.”
At the most recent School Board meeting, Short said, “Listen to what people are telling you. At least hear them. If you don’t want to do what they say, that’s great, but at least hear them.”
Spotsylvania’s staffing problem remains severe, but every educator said that they believed the county is capable of making a full recovery.
“We have amazing teachers who love students and want to do the best for them that they can,” Spears said. “Spotsy can be amazing again. It’s just going to take a little time.”
The school division offered the following statement.
“Spotsylvania County Public Schools is committed to providing excellent instruction in all subjects. Similar to many localities across the Commonwealth and nation, the teacher shortage is impacting all of our Spotsylvania County Schools. There is a critical shortage specifically in the area of mathematics that is impacting our high schools. The division is working feverishly to address this situation and is exploring all avenues to ensure our students’ success. This includes using evidence-based strategies to include online learning platforms such as Edgenuity for continued learning until another acceptable long-term solution is implemented.
SCPS continues to advertise, interview, and hire new personnel. If you or someone you know is interested in teaching math, and have a bachelor’s degree, please consider applying today using our online application system found on our division website. Please also contact Dr. Chris Collier, Director of Human Resources, if you have any questions or need additional support.”
