The Sumter County School District is searching for solutions to an issue affecting all of Florida — adequately staffing its schools.
The student population at the district’s public schools grew from 5,427 students last school year to 5,785 this year, Assistant Superintendent Debbie Moffitt said, with increases at every school. At the same time, filling open staff positions has been challenging since the pandemic.
“Vacancy totals have been slowly increasing for many years, however, the last two to three years have been extreme,” said Dana Williams, senior director of human resources for the district. “We normally hire between 50 and 60 new teachers annually. Now it’s over 100.”
At the end of January, the district had 12 teacher vacancies, as well as openings for 17 paraprofessionals and around 18 bus drivers.
“Fifteen years ago we had 20-plus applicants for a teaching job,” Williams said. “Now schools are fortunate if they have one to three.”
The applicant pool also has changed, she said, as more teachers are coming from outside the discipline.
“Over 50% of the teachers we hire are alternatively-certified, which means they did not graduate from a college of education,” Williams said. “We have hired many stellar ACP teachers, so we’re quite happy that is an option, but ACP teachers must complete numerous teacher preparation tasks and exams within their first three years, while trying to teach and manage life.”
The school board will consider how to support the influx of students at a workshop at 4 p.m. today at Sumter P.R.E.P. (Positive Response Education Program) Academy in Wildwood. The school board general meeting starts at 5:30 p.m. today. Both meetings are open to the public.
Getting Creative
Summer Shirley, principal at Wildwood Elementary School, has welcomed the growth over the last two school years.
“When I first accepted the principal position at WWES, our student population was 696 students in March of 2021 with declining enrollment over the years,” Shirley said. “I shared with my faculty and staff that I had a goal of reaching over 800 students. I wanted people — teachers, parents, families and students — to be knocking down the doors to get into our school, not out.”
Wildwood Elementary has seen the largest gain in the last two years, with 920 kindergarten though fifth grade students expected in the 2023-24 school year, an increase of more than 100 students.
Shirley said the school is working to adapt.
“While this rapid growth is hard to keep up with due to national teacher shortages, there is no place I would rather the students in our community to be but our school,” Shirley said. “We have had to get creative with space and have opened up every room on campus for classrooms, have resource teachers teaching classes, and currently have a waiting list for out of zone requests.”
The district and administrators say increased housing has contributed to the change.
“I think we have seen an increase in growth due to the large number of apartments, condos, townhomes and houses being built in the area,” Shirley said. “Further, as The Villages expands and creates more job and career opportunities, more families are moving into the local areas.”
New Schools, New Jobs
That growth extends beyond public schools, as The Villages Charter School soon will usher students into its new South Campus, which includes an additional K-8 school and a new location for The Villages High School.
The district’s student population including charter school students, which make up 36.9% of the student enrollment in the county, is up from 8,840 in 2018-19 to 9,404 in 2022-23, according to the Florida Department of Education.
The new campus opens in the fall, bringing expanded employment opportunities at VCS. More than 30 teaching and support staff positions were open as of Friday at VCS and The Villages Early Learning Company.
Randy McDaniel, director of education for The Villages Charter School, said so far VCS has managed to avoid hiring difficulties and he is “very pleased with the applicants we’ve gotten so far.”
“We’re very fortunate that The Villages is a growing community with national recognition,” McDaniel said. “We are a beneficiary of our local residents — they say, ‘Hey, move down here and live with us and go work at the charter school.’ They’re our best recruiter by far.”
To see employment opportunities at VCS and TVELC, go to thevillages.com/careers.
Statewide Efforts
The Florida Education Association, the largest teacher union in Florida, tracks teacher vacancies in the 67 county school districts in Florida and reported 10,771 vacancies for teachers and support staff in August 2022.
Andrew Spar, president of Florida Education Association, said in a social media post that as of Jan. 12, that number was down to 9,925 total vacancies, but that is a 21% increase over last year at this time.
Both the Florida Department of Education and Gov. Ron DeSantis have put together programs to try and alleviate the strain.
The Florida Department of Education in July 2022 began offering honorably discharged veterans a five-year temporary teaching certification as long as they adhered to certain requirements and pursued a bachelor’s degree.
DeSantis has focused on teacher pay, increasing the average starting teacher salary to $48,000 for the 2022-23 school year. He also proposed adding $200 million to the state budget for teacher pay, according to a news release from the governor’s office.
To learn about earning a teaching certification in Florida, go to fldoe.org/teaching/certification.
The Sumter district’s employment website is at sumter.k12.fl.us/Page/5814.