Will County educators get in-depth look at teacher ‘shortage’

Will County educators recently got an in-depth look at the question of whether Illinois has enough teachers.

Advance Illinois, a policy and advocacy group that focuses on public education, presented the findings of its study titled “The State of Our Educator Pipeline 2023” to local educators Nov. 30 in Joliet.

The good news from the study is that the number of teachers coming on board at public schools has been rising.

“We were deeply understaffed,” Robin Steans, president of Advance Illinois, told local educators. “We’re catching up with what we should have.”

The bad news is that schools face shortages in bilingual and special education, and diversity among teachers remains an issue, according to the study.

Still, the teacher supply is better than many people may think, Steans said.

“If you read the headlines, you think everybody’s left and everybody’s going to leave,” she said. “But that’s not what we’ve seen.”

The number of teachers in Illinois schools saw a steady decline from 133,000 in 2010 until it began rising in 2018. By the 2021-22 school year, the number was back to 132,500, close to the 2010 level.

Those numbers, however, belie issues that schools continue to face on a daily basis, Steans and superintendents said at the presentation held at the Joliet Township High School District 204 administrative offices.

Illinois has a 2.6% vacancy rate for educator positions, Steans said.

“That’s too high,” she said. “That’s thousands of teachers.”

The vacancy rate for teachers in Will County is lower at 1.6%. But vacancies for bilingual teachers is at 3.5% and for special education teachers is at 5.4%.

District 204 Superintendent Karla Guseman made the COVID-19 pandemic a benchmark for the district’s vacancy rate for teachers.

“We never had a vacancy before COVID,” Guseman said. “Now we have five.”

Fairmont School District 89 Superintendent Tamela Daniels said the Lockport-area school district struggles to find bilingual teachers in a district that now is half Hispanic.

“One of our biggest issues now is having bilingual teachers,” Daniels said. “That’s an area where the state continues to tell us we need more teachers.”

Steans said diversity among teachers is a growing issue, with high rates of educators from minority groups leaving the profession and lower numbers pursuing teaching as a profession.

“We have a more diverse group of students going into bachelor’s programs than we have in teacher preparation programs,” she said.

Black teachers leave the Illinois workforce at a higher rate each year than Hispanic, Asian and white teachers, according to the Advance Illinois study.

Statewide, about 18% of teachers are Black, Hispanic or Asian. In Will County, that percentage is close to 11%, while the number of students in those groups are more than 50%, according to the study.