Escambia and Santa Rosa schools in desperate need of more staff amid workforce shortage
Collin Warren-Hicks/Pensacola News Journal/ June 14, 2022
Schools all over the country lost teachers due to the social and emotional effects of COVID-19, and public schools in the Florida Panhandle weren’t spared.
The Escambia County School District and the Santa Rosa County School District are in need of teachers and support staff to fill their hundreds of vacancies before the first bell next fall.
Schools all over the country lost teachers due to the social and emotional effects of COVID-19, and public schools in the Florida Panhandle weren’t spared.
The Escambia County School District and the Santa Rosa County School District are in need of teachers and support staff to fill their hundreds of vacancies before the first bell next fall.
“In the summer of 2021, we had 80 teacher positions open,” said Caroline Gray, coordinator of employee services for the Escambia County School District.
As of Thursday, that number grew to 139 open jobs within the district in need of filling.
“It is a lot higher this summer than it even was last summer,” Gray said, noting that last summer’s vacancy numbers were considered high.
The 139 vacancies were “mainly for teachers,” Gray said, cafeteria and custodial staff, clerical positions and assistant teachers are also needed.
“With the bus driver shortage,” she added, “we had to rework bus routes and elementary start times.”
Breaking down the numbers by grade level, Escambia County public schools ideally will fill 110 positions at the elementary-school level, 81 positions at the middle-school level and 48 positions at the high-school level by the end of the summer, Gray said.
But it wasn’t as if the district simply lost teachers and staff all at once in one massive wave of resignations.
“It’s just been a smooth, dripping digression, I guess,” Gray said. “There have been a lot of retirees, and just things like that,” she said.
The Santa Rosa County School District as of May had 294 open instructional positions, according to Director of Human Resources BJ Price.
However, as of Friday, 104 of those 294 vacancies had already been filled.
The number of open jobs is influenced by growth in the county and school district, as well as the number of military members who move in and out of the county on an annual basis. Despite having 190 jobs left to fill, the number of vacancies actually reflects an improvement from last year.
Between the end of the 2020-2021 school and the start of the 2021-2022 academic calendar, last summer, the Santa Rosa County School District filled 397 vacancies.
Data was not immediately available for the summer of 2020, but Price said that the district filled 292 vaccines during the summer of 2019, before much of the world had ever heard of COVID-19.
That means from a number perspective, the district’s number of open jobs have settled back down close to a pre-pandemic average, Price said.
“We definitely hear from staff that COVID forced them to reconsider their situations, but the data does not show that we have that more vacancies this year than they did pre-pandemic,” Price said.
Still, that does not mean that Santa Rosa County district administrators aren’t apprehensive. Price said there is a district-wide urgency to fill the open positions in Santa Rosa County schools due to employers’ heighted competition to find top applicants.
Why teachers are harder to find
District administrators say there has not been one grand reason for why teachers and school staff have decided to leave their positions.
When the number of people testing positive for COVID-19 in Escambia County were at their worst, many public school teachers took medical leaves of absences from their jobs out of fear for their own health or someone with whom they lived.
Some of those teachers who took their leave simply never came back, leaving many unknowns for district recruiters and hiring directors alike.
Additionally, an unusually high number of teachers in both Escambia and Santa Rosa counties chose to retire during the pandemic.
“I think that there are a lot of folks who are reevaluating their employment and their financial status due to COVID,” Price said. “And we have some of our folks who are closer to the retirement age who feel like they’re secure enough and are going to go ahead and hang it up.
“We also have folks who are looking for an industry or a career change,” he said.
“Those people may return to work this year,” Gray said. “But they may not depending on their own situations.”
Gray believes that the adaptability required of teachers during the pandemic made an already hard job harder.
“Every year, there are different pressures that are placed on teachers, whether it’s moving to electronic hybrid teaching,” she said. “That was certainly a difficult step. But in my own teaching career, I knew that every year there was going to be a change, that we had to be flexible and adaptable whether it was legislative changes or changing expectations. Also, the kids are always changing.”
What’s being done by Escambia and Santa Rosa schools
Both local school districts have already found success at making new hires at recent job fairs.
The Escambia County School District hired four new teachers at a June 9 job fair that targeted potential new hires interested in working at the schools with the most vacancies: O.J Semmes and Warrington elementary schools, Warrington and Bellview middle schools and Pine Forest High School.
The Escambia County School District hosted a job fair Monday at the J. E. Hall Center located at 30 E. Texar Drive in Pensacola, and has plans for more.
Every department with vacancies is going to be there taking resumes, doing on site interviews and we’ll have laptops set up,” Gray said. “If you don’t find a job that works for you in one department, we can get you to somewhere that does.”
Many the Santa Rosa district’s recent 104 new hires were also made at or because of its own job fairs.
“The job fair was the biggest thing for us, and we are trying to be more proactive,” Price said, noting that district staff and principals have used social media as a recruiting tool.
Both districts are optimistic about filling their vacancies before the start of school. But they also know their work is cut out for them.
