August 8, 2005
Rural-area teacher shortage looms Silver Falls district has avoided many reform-plan pitfalls
BY RAJU CHEBIUM
Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON - Rural school districts traditionally have had a tough time attracting teachers because they can´t pay as well as metropolitan schools or offer the amenities of cities.

The federal No Child Left Behind education law will make recruitment even more difficult, rural educators said. Signed by President Bush in 2002, it requires all school districts to have "highly qualified" teachers in place by spring.

New teachers must have coursework in the subjects they teach or pass subject proficiency exams. Current teachers also can pass such tests or prove proficiency by taking college classes or enrolling in professional development programs. All teachers are required to have at least a bachelor´s degree.

In rural schools, teachers tend to be generalists who teach an array of subjects at several grade levels. As schools try to hire teachers with specific subject skills, rural educators say, states must come up with money they don´t have to compete for the best teachers.

That´s not true everywhere.

"We have been pretty successful here in attracting teachers that meet the highly qualified standards," said Silver Falls School District Superintendent Craig Roessler in Silverton. "The area we are going to have some difficulty with highly qualified teachers is in special education."

The district had four openings in special education this year.

"It´s an area we are concerned about," Roessler said, adding that the shortage of high-quality teachers is a national impasse.

Silver Falls Personnel and Curriculum Director Dale Koger returned from the Confederation of School Administrators meeting in Eugene on Thursday with a plan that might resolve his district´s special-education-qualification shortage.

The three-day meeting ended with a consensus that, if high school teachers can pass multiple subject exams, they will be considered "highly qualified."

Koger said the district has until the end of June 2006 to get teachers in the district up to the standard.

"It is a huge problem," Koger said. "If we don´t have anyone take that test, I don´t know what we are going to do."

Elsewhere, educators´ reactions are mixed.

"The real problem is No Child Left Behind was designed to correct the ills of the educational system in urban areas," said Bob Mooneyham of the National Rural Education Association, based in Oklahoma. "Very little consideration was given to this supply-and-demand factor for rural teachers."

"It´s not like a student is graduating from a university and setting their sights on rural America to teach."

Brent Walker, the principal at Haverhill Cooperative Middle School in New Hampshire, has two teacher openings. Because his school is in a small town of 4,200 residents, he said, it is difficult to persuade teachers to move to an area where it can get 30 degrees below zero in the winter. The nearest town of significant size, Hanover, is 45 minutes south. Walker said that he doesn´t expect to have more than a handful of candidates with all the up-to-date teaching credentials in place.

"What rural districts often have to do is find the right person who´s the right fit for the school ... and invest in training that person for that unique role," he said.

States with large urban areas, such as New Jersey, Connecticut and California, pay their teachers far more than predominantly rural states such as West Virginia, Montana and the Dakotas, according to a recent survey by the National Education Association, a teachers union.

Even within states, urban school districts pay more than rural ones. Rural districts tend to have fewer students, so they cannot justify the additional expense to hire more teachers, Mooneyham said.

Low pay is a key reason three of four new Montana teachers are hired away by Nevada, Florida and California, said Claudette Morton, the director of the Montana Small Schools Alliance.

Greater Las Vegas, the fastest-growing urban area in the country, is the biggest recruiter of Montana teachers, she said.

"It’s certainly not attractive to start out at $20,000 a year when you have $40,000 to $50,000 in (college) debt," Morton said.

Recognizing that rural America will find it particularly difficult to recruit qualified teachers, the Bush administration has set aside special allocations, said Rene Islas, a teacher-quality specialist at the Education Department.

The federal government will give states $3 billion in grants to improve the quality of teachers, particularly in the poorest regions of the country. No Child Left Behind also gives the most isolated school districts as long as three years to train teachers already qualified to teach one subject to become competent in other subjects as well.

Reporter Angelina Morgan of the Silverton Appeal contributed to this article.