5 days ago
Pennsylvania struggling to fill classrooms with teachers, organizations look to assist
CENTRE COUNTY, Pa. (WTAJ) — Filling classrooms with teachers in Pennsylvania is becoming more difficult every year, and many organizations are stepping up to try and fill vacancies.
One organization is the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA). The PSEA represents 178,000 education professionals in Pennsylvania. Assistant Director of Communications Chris Lilienthal said the amount of decline in new teachers is a crisis.
'Since 2012-13, Pennsylvania has seen a 65% decline in the number of new teacher certificates issued in the state,' Lilienthal said.
With so many open positions and the low number of individuals attempting to get certificates, the Commonwealth has issued emergency permits so that classrooms are filled. Emergency permit numbers surged to fill classroom vacancies, rising by 660 to reach 8,747 last school year.
The permits are filled by college-educated workers who don't have an education degree or are certified in a different subject area than what they were hired to teach. An independent analysis of state data performed by Ed Fuller, director of the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy Analysis in the Educational Leadership Program at Penn State University, showed 8,885 teachers leaving the profession in 2024-25, up by 559 compared to the year before.
The PSEA introduced Educators Rising, a program that offers classroom-ready curriculum, training, and support to high school students looking to become educators.
'We're bringing a curriculum into dozens of high schools across the state, introducing kids while they're still in high school to what a career in public education would look like,' Lilienthal said.
At the college level, a student teaching stipend gives student teachers $10,000. Part of the program keeps the teacher in Pennsylvania for at least three years.
'As we continue with that program, we're going to see more and more people coming into our teacher pipeline who are going to stay in Pennsylvania,' Lilienthal said.
We're also told that the PSEA is attempting to push for legislation that would change the base salary for teachers in the Commonwealth. The last time the base salary was changed was over 30 years ago, and it was set at $18,500. The proposed change would be a minimum of $60,000.
'This is something where we really need to make sure that we're paying our teachers competitively so that we can recruit and retain the best and brightest into our classrooms,' Lilienthal said.
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