This past school year has seen a record amount of shortages hitting throughout a lot of the United States. Many schools were struggling to hire before the start of the 2023 school year, and not just teachers. Depending on your situation, you may already be experiencing the aftermath of these teacher shortages, or are even considering homeschooling for next year.
The Outlook
Schools struggled to fill positions before the start of the school year, and may be in a better position as the school year continued. But this is not the case for all schools, many states are still actively hiring for teachers. Other departments, such as IT and even bus drivers, have had a huge decrease in the amount of hiring needed to fill the positions. Even if a school is not experiencing a hiring shortage, they may be experiencing a heavy number of teachers retiring. This can have almost a bigger impact on schools as they will have even more positions to fill by next school year.
What This Can Mean for You
Whether you are directly affected by these shortages or not, there may come a day when your children’s schools are starting to become affected by the hiring process. Even if a lot of college grads are getting into teacher careers, the amount of teachers retiring may also throw a monkey wrench into the numbers as well. Remote learning can offer an easy way to help lift the burden of teachers. With classrooms learning from home and from multiple platforms, this can help teachers take a breather between full-blown teaching and potentially filling in on other grades and subjects while short-staffed. Being able to teach even from home can help teachers feel less stressed and even take the burden off of some schools. This can even help with the bus driver shortage as this would mean less children needing to go to school on a daily basis.
A Step Further: Homeschooling
You may even consider homeschooling and taking over the role of teacher all together. This can afford much more flexibility for you and your child, as you can set the schedule, subjects, and what they are specifically learning on a daily basis. Of course, this can also increase your work load, but if you were already considering homeschooling and are now experiencing a teacher shortage, this may be the right time to make the switch!
Katie Kyzivat