Public officials should use these resources immediately to make public elementary and secondary school jobs more appealing (raising pay and strengthening benefits for both teachers and support staff), enact strong COVID protections, invest in teacher development programs, and experiment with ways to support part-time and part-year staff when school is not in session. While some of these funds are directed formulaically to school districts, policymakers at the state and local level have considerable discretion over enormous resources, particularly when it comes to hiring public-sector staff and enacting COVID-mitigation measures. Pandemic relief in the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) have provided unprecedented levels of federal funding to states, counties, municipal governments, tribal territories, and school districts. Calling in the National Guard, as some state governors have done, may get the buses rolling for now, but it will not solve the underlying issue: a lack of investment in public schools and school employees, both teachers and support staff (Lee and Attanasio 2022).įortunately, many states and localities confronting shortages have capacity right now to begin reversing this long-running underinvestment. ![]() But the reality is that staff shortages in K–12 schools are a problem that policymakers in much of the country have had for decades. 2 Many K–12 school support staff-particularly bus drivers, food service workers, and custodial staff-tend to be older and thus more susceptible to severe COVID. ![]() Inadequate safety measures and, in some cases, public officials’ outright opposition to commonsense steps to protect staff and control the pandemic have undoubtedly exacerbated staffing problems. 1 The pandemic has wreaked havoc on the country’s K–12 educational workforce, with overworked educators retiring or leaving the profession, insufficient substitute teachers to fill in when COVID hits a district, too few paraprofessionals and teaching assistants there to support students who are struggling after more than a year of virtual learning, not enough bus drivers to get students to and from school, and skeleton crews of custodial and food service workers trying to make do (Sainato 2021 Truong 2022 Elsen-Rooney 2021 Klein 2021 Lee and Attanasio 2022). This research was first presented on January 27, 2022, to a task force of the American Federation of Teachers on the teacher and school staff shortage.Įver since students began returning to classrooms in the late summer and fall of 2021, countless news stories have described intense staffing shortages in primary and secondary schools. They also need to plan for sustainable long-term investments in the K–12 public education workforce. ![]() Policymakers should tap into the hundreds of billions of dollars in federal COVID relief funds available now to raise pay for education staff, enact strong COVID protections, invest in teacher development programs, and experiment with ways to support part-time and part-year staff when school is not in session.Past EPI research shows that public K–12 school teachers are paid 19.2% less than similar workers in other occupations. Inadequate pay is a long-standing issue for teachers.From 2014 to 2019, the median weekly wage (in 2020$) for food service workers in K–12 education was $331, while school bus drivers received $493 and teaching assistants $507. Low pay is a long-standing issue for support staff.workers overall are age 50 or older, compared with 66.2% of bus drivers, 55.4% of custodians, and 50.4% of food service workers in the K–12 public education workforce. Education support staff tend to be older-and thus more at risk of severe COVID-than the average U.S. COVID concerns are likely a factor in nonteacher staff shortages.Household survey data indicate that the number of employed public K–12 teachers fell by 6.8%, school bus drivers by 14.7%, school custodians by 6.0%, and teaching assistants by 2.6%. Since the beginning of the pandemic, state and local public education employment fell by nearly 5% overall, with much larger declines in some states, according to establishment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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