Kansas schools trying to fill nearly 2,000 teaching positions

WICHITA, Kan. (KWCH) - School districts across the country are working on ways to address teacher shortages. This week the teacher licensure director for the Kansas State Department of Education told the state board of education Kansas currently has 1,954 open teaching positions. That’s an 8 percent increase from the Spring 2024 semester.

“Many of the teachers are leaving the profession due to low salaries, burnout, and lack of ,” says United Teachers of Wichita President Katie Warren. “I also feel that teachers, they’re very overwhelmed with the increase in expectations that have been put on them. Especially taking on those roles beyond just teaching.”

Warren says right now she feels like there’s a negative view of teachers. She says when she became a teacher 20 years ago everyone thought that was a wonderful career path. But today she feels teachers aren’t respected enough. “Just the perception of the profession in the last, you know, 20 years, it’s really sad.”

Wichita Public Schools is bucking that trend. Schools in the Wichita area have seen a 51 percent decrease in teacher position vacancies since the Spring 2024 semester. Wichita Public Schools Chief Human Resources Officer Sean Hudspeth says that’s largely because of the school closures earlier this year.

“What that essentially did is that pushed 383 staff into other open positions across the district,” says Hudspeth. “Which means that our initial new teacher induction staff orientation in August only meant that we hired 108 new teachers into our district. Which is only a fourth of what we’d have normally recruited.” Wichita Public Schools currently has 47 open teaching positions.

But school closures isn’t the only reason Wichita is seeing fewer teacher vacancies. Wichita teachers also got big raises this year. “Our teachers are one of the most highest paid teachers in the state,” says Hudspeth. “We vowed to make that a priority over the last couple of years.”

Warren says teachers definitely took notice of the raises. “Through the negotiations of our two-year contract, our first-year teachers are starting at $50,000. So that was really exciting for Wichita Public Schools. I do think retention was a little better this last year, and knowing that the teachers had a raise really did help.”

Despite the efforts by Wichita Public Schools, teacher retention remains a problem in Kansas. In fact, state education leaders say during the 2023-2024 school year they saw the highest number of teachers leaving the profession ever, 1,113. Warren says teachers need more .

“It’s been hard on our educators because we expect more than just them teaching content,” she says. “We expect them to take care of all their, the students’ mental health needs, emotional needs, social needs. And so we really need to make sure that our teachers have with all that and look at those expectation that we’re placing on them.”

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