Story at a glance
- A new report on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Virginia public school students and staff found an increase in the number of instructors leaving their jobs.
- Before the start of the school year, the state lost 10,900 teachers and only 7,028 newly licensed teachers entered the workforce.
- Pandemic-related burnout and low teacher morale are believed to be part of the reason why teachers are leaving the state’s public school system in droves.
Virginia schools are struggling to retain teachers with more instructors leaving the profession that new ones are entering.
During the early days of the pandemic, the rate of teachers abandoning the profession slowed down but then rose “substantially” during the 2021-22 school year, according to a new report from the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.
The findings were part of a larger report on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on Virginia public school students and staff.
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The major decline in teacher retention is in part linked to lower teacher morale since the pandemic, the report found.
Before the pandemic, there were about 800 vacant teaching positions across Virginia, according to the report. That number skyrocketed to 2,800 vacant teaching positions, or 3 percent of all teaching positions, by October of last year.
In addition, the number of newly licensed teachers this year was 15 percent lower than pre-pandemic average.
Before this current school year, close to 11,000 Virginia teachers left the workforce and only 7,028 instructors with first-time licenses were hired, the report found.
Not only are there more teaching vacancies but the applicant pool to fill those vacancies appears to be worsening as well.
“I’m surprised when we get an application from a fully qualified teacher,” one school division human resource director said in the report.
Report crafters also found that school divisions across the state are relying more heavily on provisionally licensed teachers instead of fully licensed teachers to fill vacant teaching positions.
During the 2021-22 school year, the number of provisionally licensed teachers went up by 24 percent compared to the states’ average before the pandemic.
And the number of instructors teaching “out of field” more than doubled this past school year as well.
Teachers don’t think the state’s instructor shortage will end any time soon.
Over half, 52 percent, of school divisions said they are “not optimistic” that they will be able to hire a “suitable” teaching workforce by next school year.
And more school teachers will likely leave the profession in the coming months, worsening the shortage.
According to the report, 15 percent of teachers in Virginia have expressed they are “definitely” leaving their job or “likely to leave” a position at a public school by the end of the academic year.
Before the pandemic, only 9 percent of Virginia’s public school teachers said they would “definitely” or “likely” leave their post.
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