No district wants to start the school year with teacher vacancies. But across the nation, they’ve become not just a concern, but an accepted reality.
A team of researchers that tracks national data on teacher shortages last fall reported 55,000 such vacancies, up from 36,000 the prior year (some states don’t report this information, so actual numbers are likely higher). Schools in many pockets of the country are starting the year with high numbers of teacher vacancies, just as they have in years past.
But Knox County Schools in Knoxville, Tenn., has a different story to tell.
One day before the district was slated to open its doors to students for the start of the new school year, 80 of its 91 schools were fully staffed for certified positions, with just eight full-time teaching positions open across the district, said Alex Moseman, executive director of talent acquisition for Knox County schools. The district employs more than 4,500 teachers and serves more than 60,500 students.
That translated to 79 percent fewer vacancies than last August. Over the last five years, Superintendent Jon Rysewyk said, the district had been averaging somewhere between 50 and 80 unfilled teaching positions on the first day of school.
The drastic change this school year isn’t a coincidence. Over the past two years, Knox County Schools underwent a multi-faceted recruitment effort to lower its teacher vacancy rate, from streamlining the hiring process to making sweeping changes to teachers’ salary schedule.
To learn more, Education Week spoke to three Knox County staff members at the initiative’s forefront: Moseman, Rysewyk, and Jennifer Hemmelgarn, the assistant superintendent of business and talent. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To what do you attribute the teacher shortage in your district?
Rysewyk: The University of Tennessee is literally six blocks away. But even connecting with graduates from their teaching program and the surrounding five or six universities and colleges producing teaching candidates, we were still having a shortage, so it was a matter of too few people coming into the area teaching programs. So we had to look at different ways of finding [teaching] candidates and streamlining the talent acquisition process.
Where did you begin looking?
Rysewyk: We began to look for answers to our teacher vacancies here in Knoxville. We asked ourselves questions like: Are there people selling insurance in the area who might be good teachers? And if there are, how do we cut through the red tape to get them there quick?
Moseman: With our KCS Educator Preparation Program, we’re able to train teachers quickly in career and technical education, which is a huge help as we think about staffing for our 865 Academies initiative—our future-forward high school pathways program that focuses on college and career preparedness.
How do candidates find their way to your district, if not through teacher prep programs?
Rysewyk: We launched a branded marketing campaign called TeachKnox that tells all the great stories of the stuff that’s happening in Knox County schools. We believe that everybody has the potential to be a great educator in KCS, and so wanted to do a better job of pushing ourselves to figure out, how can we meet anybody wherever they are, and then help them find the right pathway to becoming a great educator?
For some folks, that may not start with being a teacher. That may start with working in our food service department, or as an instructional assistant. Our streamlined online process makes it easier for candidates to take that first step, starting by filling out a quick online form. Then the candidate has a human resources liaison assigned to them to walk through the steps on a personalized basis. From the school end, that liaison is asking, “What are the vacancies my school has, and how might we connect candidates that are the right fit or the right profile?”
How do these HR liaisons fit into the district’s overall hiring strategy?
Rysewyk: Probably like every other district, we had a traditional human resource department. We did some reorganization when I came in two years ago, creating a business and talent division that brought our human resource department and our finance department under the same division. Those two sides weren’t necessarily connected before. I think that was an important step.
As part of that reorganization, we realized there’s a need for the operational side of human resources that does all the licensure and the paperwork processing and the training and the investigations and all that. So we made one-stop-shops for each of the regions, placing a human resources liaison in each one of them, assigning each principal to one of these liaisons, so they interface exclusively with that one person. And so, talent acquisition was born.
How important has it been to get a jumpstart on the hiring process during the school year?
Moseman: What we saw was that if we can get principals and candidates doing that work sooner in the hiring process, rather than having that work happen in June and July—where there’s a real time crunch, the work gets really intense, and everybody’s got a million things going on as they try to open schools—if we can get that work to happen in April and May, then we’re able to set schools up to have a much more successful start. And we knew that in September of 2023, so we began to design all the work that we’re doing in this last year’s hiring process around that idea.
It sounds like communication between the HR liaisons and principals is key to this process.
Moseman: It is. It’s helping us make sure that we move that work sooner and that we develop a deeper clarity on what the status of every single vacancy and each school is. Last year, we started having those conversations with principals before winter break. We developed a process that we called our school talent reports, so principals sat down with their HR liaison to have a conversation, talking about things like, “How did staffing season go? What are some new or specific things that we need to be aware of at the building level?” This feedback loop helps us to understand the specific needs of each one of our 91 schools, and then gets folded into what we’re thinking in terms of early interviews.
How do you motivate principals to focus on hiring so early in the season?
Moseman: In January, when we come back from winter break and have our principals meeting, we now present what we call a bite-size challenge to them: If each principal sitting in that room made one hire every other week, we would be fully staffed at the start of school. Sometimes teacher shortages feel insurmountable. But we knew, looking at the data, that if we could just make these bite-size improvements every single week, that we could get there.
When does the hiring push really start ramping up?
Moseman: As soon as we started posting positions in March, we have internal meetings between the liaisons and the recruitment team, essentially saying, “These are the X number of vacancies I’m going to personally work on filling in the upcoming week.”
We also developed something we called the staffing leader board to try to build a little bit more momentum, where every principal could see a snapshot of the rate of staffing for every single school in the district. Under no circumstance was this board intended to feel like a “gotcha.” It was more like, here’s where we are, we’re here to help, and how do we get everybody to zero [vacancies]?
Part of the recruitment strategy has involved increasing employee compensation, correct?
Hemmelgarn: That’s right. We went through a comprehensive job salary study over the course of the last year, and implemented recommendations from our third party consultant. One of those recommendations was transitioning to a new salary schedule that reflected market value, as benchmarked against 20 other school districts, for all employees—but our teachers specifically. That resulted in an average of about 10-and-a-half-percent increase for our teachers, from starting teachers to veteran teachers. It ended up being about a $44 million investment into all of our staff, not just teachers, across the district.
Where did the resources to increase employee compensation come from?
Hemmelgarn: It was a combination of things, one being the natural growth in our funding, so that went toward the investment. But more importantly, our departments revisited their budgets and examined dollars spent. We’re not getting rid of anything we need, but we’re prioritizing the dollars and making room for this investment in our staff, which we made a priority through the budget process.
Can you identify one aspect of the district’s hiring initiative most responsible for its success?
Moseman: When we look at all the different pieces—whether it’s process, timing, staff, technology, resources, candidates, all of that—I think each one plays a really important part of this orchestra of sorts that we’re playing to get fully staffed.
