By Donald Gilpin

In the first month of the new school year districts throughout the country have been scrambling to fill teaching positions in their schools, and staffing shortages have also posed challenges for the Princeton Public Schools (PPS).

In a September 20 email to PPS families and students, Superintendent Carol Kelley reported that teachers were stepping up to take on extra responsibilities and fill the gaps. As of Tuesday, September 27, PPS had job openings posted for 13 teachers — three at Princeton High School, four at Princeton Middle School, and six at the elementary schools. In addition, there were openings posted for three aides, two school psychologists, a speech and language therapist, and for substitute teachers and nurses. PPS currently has 741 staff members.

“The bottom line is that while we have managed to maintain excellence in education, staffing shortages are now the new normal throughout New Jersey,” Kelley wrote. “We will continue to creatively manage our resources, to use our trusted substitutes, and to recruit aggressively to make the best of a difficult situation.”

As of September 12, nine out of every 10 school districts in the country reported that up to 10 percent of their instructional staff positions were unfilled, according to the AASA, the School Superintendents’ Association.

Kelley emphasized that PPS is doing relatively well. “Based on our current situation, our staffing situation is much, much better than the national average,” she wrote in a September 26 email. “At this moment, there are relatively few unfilled teaching jobs. There has been a great deal of progress in recent weeks.”

In her letter to parents and students, Kelley pointed out that “the recruiting program implemented by our Human Resources Department has enabled us to frequently find fully qualified teachers, even in instances where there are severe shortages for a particular subject.”

In confronting the challenges of teacher shortages, PPS has developed closer ties with universities and colleges that have teacher training programs. In addition, PPS continues to host job fairs, which have proved successful in the past, where potential applicants meet with representatives from PPS. The district also continues to work with Central Jersey Pride (CJ Pride) to attract a diverse applicant pool.

Unlike some other districts —in Florida, for example where veterans without college degrees are being pressed into service, and in Arizona, where college students are filling some teaching jobs — Princeton seems to have the current situation under control.

Whether the colleges and universities and their training programs will be graduating enough teachers in the coming years to solve the problem of teacher shortages is not clear. In a September 23 email, Todd Kent, director of the Princeton University Program in Teacher Preparation and director of teacher certification cited the impact of the pandemic and conveyed some bad news and some good news.

“We are a small program, producing 10 to 12 teachers each year,” he wrote. “During the pandemic our numbers fell substantially. We heard about and saw teachers leaving and retiring early during the pandemic due to severely restricted and stressful teaching conditions, limited personal contact with students, and health concerns for themselves and their families.”

He continued, “These factors compounded all the other challenges that can sometimes cause teachers to leave the profession under ‘normal’ conditions. These issues also contributed to a lower interest of young people wanting to pursue careers in education. The good news is that as we begin to return to a more normal school environment, interest in our program has grown significantly over the past eight months, and we have seen our enrollment increasing toward pre-pandemic levels.”

Kent went on to state that the best way to address the teacher shortage is “to remind people that teaching is noble, worthy work, and now, more than ever, students need teachers who care deeply about them and who can address their varied needs.”

He added, “Teachers have done heroic and groundbreaking work over the past two years, and I tell our students that the nation desperately needs passionate and committed people like them to enter teaching. And, on a more practical side with concerns over a looming recession, they will be entering a field that should have plenty of jobs available in the upcoming years.”