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Chicago Tribune
16-05-2025
- Business
- Chicago Tribune
Aurora schools recruit, fill positions and find alternatives as teacher and staff shortages persist statewide
Amid persistent staffing shortages, East Aurora School District 131 has taken several new measures to recruit teachers over the past few years. Last year, the district began partnering with Aurora University to help individuals — including current employees of the district — earn college credit or teaching licenses to fill high-demand positions, said the district's Associate Superintendent of Staff and Student Services David Ballard. The district is currently working on a similar partnership with Northern Illinois University. The district also provides stipends to bilingual teachers and staff who relocate to the Aurora school district, and it also has a teacher mentor program that it hopes will help attract candidates for open positions. These programs are meant to help fill staff openings, particularly in areas the district struggles to recruit enough staff for — special education, bilingual education and paraprofessional staff, to name a few. Staffing shortages are by no means unique to East Aurora, however. In fact, the recruitment programs the district has instituted are funded by an initiative — the Illinois State Board of Education's Teacher Vacancy Grant program — that is meant to address staffing challenges in school districts statewide. The state initiative, which began as a pilot for the 2023-24 school year, provided funding to 170 of the state's most understaffed school districts, East Aurora included. Now in its second year, the program received $45 million from the state to distribute to school districts. Results so far show that 51% of districts receiving this grant funding saw a decrease in unfilled positions, compared to only 17% of districts who didn't, according to a news release from the Illinois State Board of Education last fall. While these initiatives are fairly new, the issue they're meant to address has been around since the COVID-19 pandemic, the state's organization of regional superintendents has previously said. The Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools, or IARSS, has said schools statewide are struggling to recruit qualified teachers, and seeing teachers retiring earlier than expected due to stress. The state has attempted various strategies in recent years, such as increasing the minimum pay for teachers and the vacancy grant program. This year, the problem appears to be easing slightly. The number of unfilled teaching positions in the state, for example, dropped from 4,096 during the 2023-24 year to 3,864 this school year, according to this year's report, which uses data collected by the Illinois State Board of Education and the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools. Of the Aurora-area school districts, East Aurora had by far the highest teacher vacancy rate with 39 open teaching positions, according to this year's data from ISBE and IARSS. Nearby West Aurora School District 129 had 12 unfilled teaching positions, while Indian Prairie School District 204 reported the equivalent of 2.3 vacant positions. The state dashboard's data on the number of positions is self-reported from the school districts, said Meg Bates, the director of the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative. Bates' research group is housed at the University of Illinois system and collaborated with the Illinois State Board of Education on the data collection for its educator shortage dashboard. Unfilled positions are as of Oct. 1, 2024 — and could fluctuate over the course of the year — and vacancy rates are determined by comparing the number of filled positions from last year's data with the number of unfilled positions this year. East Aurora's teacher vacancy rate is 'very high,' according to Bates, noting the disparity in openings between it and the districts surrounding it. And some content areas and specializations have more vacancies than others. For example, special education is one area where all three districts in the area are struggling to fill positions. East Aurora had 11 vacancies — a more than 12% vacancy rate — while West Aurora had five vacancies and Indian Prairie had 1.5, according to this year's data from ISBE and IARSS. As for non-teacher positions, all three districts are facing paraprofessional shortages, according to this year's data. Indian Prairie had the most openings at 53.10, while East had 22 and West had 14.30. Paraprofessional and substitute teacher shortages also bring their share of challenges on districts, said Indian Prairie fifth-grade teacher and 2024 Illinois Teacher of the Year Rachael Mahmood. Without enough of either, teachers and paraprofessionals in the schools have to adapt and pick up the slack. 'It's not restructuring that goes on for an entire year,' Mahmood said. 'It's restructuring that goes on every single morning.' She said that makes it difficult for teachers to balance taking off work when they need to, given these challenges and the strain their absence puts on their students and fellow teachers. In East Aurora, overall vacancies — inclusive of vacancies for teachers, paraprofessionals, school counselors, etc. — went up slightly in recent years, from 67 in 2023 to 71 in 2025, according to data from the Illinois State Board of Education. During those years, the number of paraprofessional openings has gone down but is still the highest share of unfilled positions in the district. The rest were primarily teaching roles across various subject areas. In the past year, East Aurora has hired 249 staff members, according to Ballard. In April, East Aurora's school board authorized another 14 staffing requests for next year: three special education teachers, two bilingual teachers, several teachers in other subject areas and three social workers. But hiring full-time staff has not been able to fill the gap completely for East Aurora, as is the case at many schools across the state. Often, the method by which vacancies are filled in school districts is through alternative measures. Relative to its neighboring districts, this has been a significant portion of how East Aurora has dealt with its staffing challenges — the district 'remedied' more teacher and support staff positions, 403 in total, than any other district in the state, per data from the 2024-25 report. West Aurora remedied the equivalent of 13 staff positions, and Indian Prairie remedied six. 'They have to do something,' Bates said about East Aurora. 'And they have a really chronic issue.' Ballard said that typically looks like hiring long-term substitute teachers, offering paid extra duty assignments for existing staff and paying for contractual staff. A number of them simply remained unfilled and unremedied. Filling positions this way is not the district's preference, he said, but sometimes it's the only option. 'We may have an emergency where there's a student who needs a one-to-one (teaching assistant), perhaps,' Ballard told The Beacon-News recently. Speech language pathologists, for example, are often difficult to fill with district employees, he said. While concerns about a teacher shortage increased in recent years, concerns about staffing preceded the COVID-19 pandemic, Bates said. But she noted that it's not equally felt across the state: the bulk of the shortage is concentrated in some content areas and a limited number of districts. A 2023 report from the education watchdog group Advance Illinois found that a vast number of vacancies are in special education and bilingual education, and it's a more prevalent issue in rural and low-income districts — a disparity state initiatives have sought to address. Last summer, the Illinois State Board of Education launched a bilingual recruitment campaign, with a particular emphasis on roles like special education and bilingual education instructors that targeted both urban and rural areas, to attempt to fill the gaps. The initiative attracted more than 17,000 individuals interested in becoming a teacher, according to a press release from the Illinois State Board of Education on March 17. The program's advertising was paid for with one-time federal pandemic relief money, and though advertising ended in January, the state's website will remain live going forward. Bates said that, from a policy perspective, it's important not to take a 'broad-brush' approach and instead to concentrate state resources and support on the districts and content areas that need it most. That's the rationale for programs like the Teacher Vacancy Grants, she explained. East Aurora is a recipient of a Teacher Vacancy Grant, for example, while neighboring Indian Prairie and West Aurora are not. And reasons for higher vacancy rates in different — sometimes neighboring — school districts are varied, Bates said, often coming down to factors like the income-level of students' families, which she said often correlates with performance on standardized tests, and sometimes with decreased funding for the district resulting from a lower property tax base. East Aurora has around 70% low-income students, according to state data from 2023-24, whereas West Aurora was 50% low-income and Indian Prairie was at 21%. 'A lot of it is perception,' Bates said in an interview in early April about districts with high low-income populations. 'It's perceived as a more challenging environment to work in.' While rural areas tend to struggle with attracting teachers willing to move, she said, urban school districts tend to face the issue of competition among nearby districts for teachers. Bates said what East Aurora 'is facing is its proximity' to West Aurora and Indian Prairie. 'It might just be, you know, teachers work and they start their career (in East Aurora) and then they're looking at Indian Prairie and thinking, I could make 10K more,' Bates said. Now, as concerns about possible Trump administration federal funding cuts to education swirl, school districts face new uncertainties. The Teacher Vacancy Grants are funded by state dollars, meaning they wouldn't be affected by possible federal funding interruptions or losses, an ISBE spokesperson told The Beacon-News previously. Some federal funding is doled out based on the number of low-income students, however, so a district like East Aurora might be harder hit by a potential loss of federal education dollars, Bates noted. Those impacts are not specific to hiring, but would likely tighten budgets in the districts reliant on that funding source. But, while uncertainty remains, local districts are doing what they can to fill positions and stay afloat. Indian Prairie said holding teaching assistant job fairs has helped fill significant gaps in support staff, namely special education paraprofessionals, according to a district spokesperson. The district also has what it calls the 'Grow Your Own Teachers' program, a joint effort between the district and teachers union started in 2021, according to past reporting. Through student clubs, social media campaigns and information and career fairs, the program is meant to encourage students to consider pursuing a career in education — and to return to Indian Prairie to do it. A spokesperson for West Aurora said that the district is 'currently well-staffed,' but, still, they've made new marketing materials and brought current teachers to job fairs and hiring events to talk about their experiences in the district. Like East Aurora, they also pointed to their two-year induction and mentoring program for new teachers as a key retention strategy. And much of East's focus is on widening the applicant pool, Ballard said, such as its initiatives meant to help individuals get licensed to fill in-demand roles. 'While we try a number of tried-and-true tactics that everybody else does — job fairs, and those kinds of things, student teachers, those kind of personal connections — we also want to explore ways that we're trying to reach out in a proactive way,' Ballard said. 'We know that we've got to expand our reach … recruiting, retention is really a full-time thing.' Mahmood said statewide and district programs can address some of the major issues school districts have with attracting teachers, like improving pay. But there are other, non-monetary factors for what makes a teacher come to or stay at their school. 'I believe that a person who feels belonging in their district or school … is going to want to stay, even if it's not the highest pay,' Mahmood said. Belonging has been a key theme of the work she is doing during her year-long sabbatical to advance the profession of teaching, she said. 'There's something in your heart that makes you feel connected in a way that fills a piece of you that you need filled.' she said. And that in itself is a long-term recruitment strategy, she said. 'If teachers were so validated and affirmed in the work they did, and they poured all of that onto kids, and kids saw teachers having, like, the time of their life in the classrooms, and classrooms were so much fun, and all these things were going on, they'd be like, 'Man, I'd love to have a career like this,'' Mahmood said. 'We have 12 years of advertisement for our career.'
Chicago Tribune
26-03-2025
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Five years since start of pandemic, Aurora school districts talk technology, mental health and lessons learned
When students showed up to their junior year English class at East Aurora High School remotely in the fall of 2020, their teacher, Melinda Thomas, had not met them face-to-face. The seniors she'd met the year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but this group of students was new to her. As the year went on, she continued to face obstacles getting face-to-face interaction with her students. 'A lot of students were either reluctant to turn on their cameras or, for various reasons, you know, maybe their technology didn't allow them to turn on the cameras,' Thomas recalled. She said sometimes she would work one-on-one with a student and ask them a question, and they would type a response instead of answer out loud – sometimes because their microphone didn't work, and sometimes because they didn't want to speak in the remote class. Even when her school returned to in-person instruction, Thomas said it was difficult to communicate with students without seeing their facial expressions and difficult to convey her own emotions as she wore a mask herself. Those days are over now, but some of the difficulties still persist, Thomas said. She said she sees more social anxiety and mental health issues in her classrooms, which she attributes to both the pandemic and to an increased prevalence of technology use. She still has trouble getting students to participate like they used to. 'We've always had students who said, 'I don't want to work in groups,'' Thomas said. 'That's not new. But, having students who won't talk to anyone else in the room, that's more unusual.' A lot has changed in the five years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Life has largely returned to normal, as has classroom instruction in local schools. But, in many ways – from technology use to student mental health – Aurora-area districts say the pandemic forced great change in their schools, and accelerated changes that were already underway. Technology was one of the first major shifts. To adapt to the district's remote learning policies, which lasted from the start of the pandemic to the following spring, East Aurora School District 131 had to rapidly play catch-up on technology access. The district scrambled to get computers out to all middle school and high school students, said Jennifer Norrell, who was superintendent of the district through the pandemic up until earlier this month. Unlike some nearby districts, students didn't have 1:1 access to a district-provided computer. East Aurora gave out physical packets of classwork to elementary school students, Norrell said. Federal pandemic relief funding not used for health and sanitation measures in the district immediately went toward buying iPads for elementary school students. The district also began using Google Workspace, a system the district continues to use, according to Andrew Allen, East Aurora's executive director of information systems. 'Normally, that's kind of a slower rollout,' Norrell said of the transition, saying that the district would have ordinarily done a smaller pilot of the technology if it weren't for the pandemic. 'But, I mean, we couldn't. … That was the only way for them to teach with the kids.' They also provided hotspots to students without reliable home internet access, another school policy that has continued, Allen said. East Aurora's enrollment is roughly 12,000, down about 1,000 students since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the Illinois State Board of Education. Allen said just over 3% of students still use hotspots to complete their coursework at home. At Indian Prairie School District 204, families were encouraged to enroll in T-Mobile's Project 10Million, which provides free internet to students, according to Rod Mack, the district's chief technology officer. Now, the district pays for a number of hotspots that students can use if they don't have reliable internet access at home. Indian Prairie had recently shifted to 1:1 computer access before the pandemic, so they didn't have to make a total technology overhaul, Mack noted. But they have since moved to primarily submitting assignments online, Mack noted, a shift that might have had a greater impact on the staff than the students. 'Teachers learned that on the dime,' Mack told The Beacon-News. 'Students kind of grew up with it.' He said his office devoted considerable time to helping teachers learn how to use technology for remote teaching – instruction that also had to be done virtually. Zoom, for example, was updated with new tools constantly, Mack said, which required teachers to learn new functionalities for remote classes. Now that schools continue to use this technology, it can be used on an as-needed basis, noted the Indian Prairie Parents' Council, which oversees the district's Parent Teacher Associations and Parent Teacher Student Associations. It means the end-of-year school calendar is 'not as fluid as it used to be,' the Indian Prairie Parents' Council said in a statement to The Beacon-News, because snow days can be conducted remotely. But the downside is kids may not get to experience a true 'snow day,' they noted. During the COVID-19 pandemic, school districts across the country received federal money from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, which is commonly referred to as ESSER funding, to help them operate during the pandemic. At Indian Prairie, the first installment of that funding went toward cleaning and social distancing efforts, said the district's Chief School Business Official Matthew Shipley. Subsequent waves of federal funding went to capital projects and additional programming to support student learning for the more than 25,000 students in the district, according to data from ISBE. The district received around $13 million from 2021-2024, Shipley said, but it had to be spent by Sept. 30, 2024. 'There was always a challenge of, 'How do we provide programming that addresses, that directly addresses, the concerns we're having coming out of the COVID period – so, the specific learning recovery that needed to be accomplished – but also recognizing these funds were temporary,' Shipley said. Indian Prairie reduced class sizes in kindergarten through second grade, for example, by hiring about 20 teachers across the district, Shipley said. Although the pandemic-era federal funding has run out, the district decided to continue with these class sizes using local funds to pay for the additional staff. They also added summer school and after-school programs to catch students up academically to account for interruptions in learning from the pandemic, and offered 'take-home tote bags' for elementary school students over the summer with books, arts supplies and math resources. Those programs won't continue now that the COVID funds have expired. West Aurora School District 129 also instituted new programming to address learning challenges during the pandemic, according to a district spokesperson. They created a supplemental program called Success Through Academic Recovery for high school students, offer small-group virtual tutoring and provide supplemental instruction in reading and math through an online program called iReady. East Aurora, too, implemented summer school programs and new curriculum initiatives, Norrell said. They also used pandemic funds to build a new facility at their old district office called the Resilience Education Center. It opened in March 2024, according to the district. It has mental health counseling with social workers and clinicians, career programming – including a recording studio and broadcast journalism studio – and art and physical wellness offerings. Norrell said the district was deliberate in using pandemic funding toward long-term investments like capital projects and training for teaching staff. 'By doing that … we were able to make sure that when the money went away, we didn't have to change gears,' Norrell said. Instead of having to add a significant number of new staff, for example, Norrell said the district provided training to classroom staff to support student well-being. 'We needed everybody to be a social worker, so to speak,' Norrell said about the training given to teachers during the COVID period and the district's attempts to avoid what she called an 'intervention cliff.' At East Aurora High School, the district also instituted 15-minute office hours in the morning once learning resumed in a hybrid format, according to Jonathan Simpson, who was the principal of East Aurora High School during the pandemic and now works as the principal of Allen Elementary. During office hours, students could get one-on-one academic help, talk to their social worker or speak with a coach or other staff member. Addressing mental health challenges was top-of-mind for the districts, officials said, and a lasting legacy of the pandemic. Indian Prairie recently began offering free after-school counseling via a grant from Endeavor Health, Shipley said. Last year, West Aurora opened the Jeff Craig Family Resource Center, which provides physical and mental health services and a small food pantry for its students, in partnership with VNA Health Care. They are also in their third year of having 'restorative practice counselors,' who help with handling disciplinary issues and conflict resolution in the district, a district spokesperson said. The causes of student mental health concerns upon returning to in-person classes were wide-ranging, Norrell said. Not only did students miss out on a year of socializing with their peers, some had lost loved ones to COVID and others had family who lost work. 'There was so much social-emotional wellness … that was equal to what we experienced in terms of learning loss,' Norrell said. She also noted the impact of racial tensions in 2020 following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. 'That too was a huge part of the trauma.' Nevertheless, officials at East Aurora said the return to in-person learning was a formative memory. Former East Aurora High School principal Simpson said the 2021 graduation – which the district held outside at Northern Illinois University's football field to comply with COVID restrictions – was a notable turning point in the return to normal. 'I can't even begin to describe it in words,' Simpson said. 'It will be an image I remember forever.' Still, despite COVID-era programs and changes, some of which have continued through today, some issues have persisted. Thomas, who continues to teach English at East Aurora High School, said distraction during class and attention span remains a problem in her classroom. 'We've always struggled with, 'OK, we're going to assign this book, and what do we do with the kids that don't read it?'' Thomas said. 'But, now, it's, it's almost like, 'OK, we're starting on the assumption that almost nobody is going to read it? So, how do we teach it instead?'' Thomas said teachers will sometimes show movies to accompany the books they read, or break up class time into multiple segments to keep students' attention, or do close readings of sections of books. But it's not all due to the pandemic, she said. 'COVID exacerbated a lot of issues that we were already beginning to see,' she said. 'COVID sped up the process.' But some district officials say the pandemic has offered some valuable lessons in adapting to technology – and adapting in general. Mack said he doesn't think school districts would have been ready for the explosion of AI use otherwise. 'If AI happened before a pandemic, teachers would be like, 'Turn the internet off … I'm not ready to handle this,'' Mack said. Going forward, the districts hope they'll be able to continue adapting, no matter what uncertainty they face. 'I think COVID taught us some valuable lessons,' Shipley said. 'Pivoting, and being flexible and ensuring we were able to meet the needs of our students and our families. … Hopefully, we kind of take some of (those) lessons learned and take some of that spirit, if you will, that allowed us to function during that time.'
