University of Montana student Samantha May takes the teacher shortage in Montana personally.
She grew up on the Hi-Line in Joplin and experienced its impacts firsthand.
Music teachers churned through the school year after year. When the district hit a dead end for hiring replacements, they turned to community members to help keep the program alive. In high school science, she spent a semester learning online and the rest of the year with a long-term substitute who had no science background.
The inconsistency in science left long-term impacts on her education, she said, resulting in low test scores on science portions of standardized tests and other challenges as she navigated college courses.
That’s why she’s taking matters into her own hands.
She wants to be the source of support and consistency in an area of the state that experiences high staff turnover and limited resources for mental health support.
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May is currently a psychology student at UM and on track to become a school counselor on the Hi-Line after completing her master's degree.
“If there’s anything that I could do to play a part and go back to the Hi-Line and help these people, including myself, that’s what I want to do,” May said.
The teacher shortage in Montana is not a new issue; in fact, it’s generally been more challenging for rural school districts to attract and retain teachers.
Since the COVID pandemic however, many districts across the state are seeing fewer applicants for positions than ever before. It's not just the Hi-Line. Even larger districts closer to population centers feel the shortage, according to Adrea Lawrence, dean of the Phyllis J. Washington College of Education at UM.
In 1991, Montana identified educator shortages at the county level in biology and reading. By 2017, 10 more disciplines reported deficits; including art, career and technical education, English, math, music, school counselors, librarians, psychologists, science, social studies, special education and world languages, according to research by the Regional Educational Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Education.
The current landscape of Montana’s teacher shortage matches a trend happening in states around the country since the COVID pandemic. In the past two years, state and local public education employment fell by nearly 5% overall, according to data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
Prior to the pandemic, one in six teachers said they were likely to leave their careers. After the 2020-2021 school year that increased to nearly one in four teachers. Many cited stress as the reason, a 2021 study by the RAND research corporation found.
Administrators, teachers and other education advocates agree that the needs of students shifted during the pandemic. As a result the roles and responsibilities of teachers often increased.
“I think the pandemic changed it a little bit,” said Dennis Parman, executive director of the Montana Rural Education Association. “Nationally we’ve seen a lot of educators leave the profession and so that hurt because it creates a number of jobs that need to be filled. I also think that there’s politically been a lot of negative commentary about public education.”
Teacher pay
School districts have also struggled to maintain pay scales competitive with neighboring states.
The average starting salary for a teacher in Montana was $32,871 during the 2019-2020 school year, the lowest of any other state in the country and nearly $8,000 less than the national average, according to an analysis by the Learning Policy Institute. On average, Idaho starts its teachers at $38,015, North Dakota at $40,106 and Wyoming at $46,558.
“That’s something that the university can’t control. We have no purview over teacher compensation or around school climate and school culture,” Lawrence said. “We can help people be prepared to go in and play their role in creating a positive school culture.”
The other issue feeding the national teacher shortage is the drastic drop of students who graduate from teacher preparation programs. Enrollment in teacher preparation programs in the United States fell from 725,000 during the 2009-2010 year to 441,439 in 2015-2016.
While the number of students in teacher preparation programs is falling nationally, many colleges of education located in Montana aren’t experiencing that trend and have remained fairly consistent in terms of their enrollment.
“Numbers reflect that the colleges and universities in Montana are graduating enough new teachers each year to cover retirements, which is what happens in an ideal system,” said Dr. Estee Aiken, the chair of the education division at the University of Montana Western in Dillon.
However, teacher preparation programs cannot keep up with the increasing demand as more teachers are leaving their careers prior to retirement.
Nontraditional paths
Typically, graduates from programs at Montana State University-Northern in Havre and University of Montana Western in Dillon see higher rates of their teaching candidates take jobs in Montana. These programs also are taking full advantage of grow-your-own-teacher initiatives made possible through the Legislature.
In an effort to make teaching degrees more accessible to those who already hold college degrees in other fields, Western launched an online certificate to support future teachers to gain their licenses. Many of these graduates go on to teach in rural schools in Montana, Aiken said.
Additionally, Western began offering its pre-kindergarten-3rd grade degree online as well, which allows those hired under emergency teaching licenses to earn the proper credentials to become licensed teachers.
Western surveyed their education graduates from the last three years and found that while 90% are still teaching, about two-thirds of them are teaching in Montana, according to Aiken.
Northern is also doing its part to make teaching a more accessible career for those on the Hi-Line. Recently, the college launched the Teachers with Promise Pathways program, which is a partnership between north-central Montana school district and Great Falls College-MSU that supports high school students on their way to becoming teachers.
“It happens to start in the high schools, so it’s financial support, academic support and professional support,” said Beth Durodoye, the dean of the college of arts, sciences and education at Northern.
Northern is the only college in the state to offer a traffic education endorsement (for driver's ed instructors) and has been doing so since 1994. The college also recently launched a three-year program that supports people teaching career and technical education classes in the state who are not currently licensed to do so, but are able to be in classrooms on temporary licenses. After completing the program, the graduates will be fully certified teachers.
Seeking new candidates
In Montana, the number of unlicensed teachers more than doubled, from 88 during the 2017-2018 school year to 185 in 2020, according to reporting by the Montana Free Press.
While programs in Havre and Dillon have typically offered more pathways to rural education, larger programs, like those at MSU in Bozeman, are also stepping up to the plate to combat the teacher shortage in rural schools.
Typically, teaching candidates from rural communities are more likely to teach in small schools. Now, MSU is making an effort to build teaching candidates into rural teachers by offering interested students more experiences in small schools while pursuing their degrees.
“One thing that we noticed is that if we can get people multiple experiences, early, ongoing experiences in rural Montana, that’s very helpful,” said John Melick, the director of field placement and licensure at the college of education at MSU.
At MSU, those experiences begin as early as a student’s sophomore year by integrating their coursework with on-the-ground experience in schools, which in turn helps build networking relationships for future job opportunities.
Eventually, students in the rural practicum participate in a weeklong immersive experience where teaching candidates visit multiple rural communities and districts.
It’s generally challenging for teaching candidates who don’t personally have backgrounds in rural communities to see themselves teaching in small schools. The rural exposure program aims to shift that by providing multiple experiences for candidates to see themselves living and working in small communities.
“Creating these opportunities early and ongoing,” Melick said, "is what I think we maybe didn’t envision the power was when we very first started this."