By Amanda Costikyan Jones
WASHINGTON – While school officials welcome the $17.5 million Maryland will get this summer to hire grade-school teachers, they say it might be hard to find enough qualified teachers to fill the positions.
Classrooms for new teachers are also in short supply in some places. But local school officials said they will find ways to bring in the teachers, who will be hired under a federally funded program to reduce class size in grades 1- 3.
“Finding them is hard,” said Ron Peiffer, a spokesman for the Maryland State Department of Education. “It’s the right thing to move in this direction, but there are all of these pitfalls.”
The checks that every county will be receiving in July are a down payment on President Clinton’s 1998 pledge to hire 100,000 new teachers nationwide to help reduce class size in the early grades.
For Maryland, the extra hiring comes in the midst of a worsening teacher shortage, caused by a surge in retirements and lagging numbers of new education graduates. And recent attempts to crack down on unqualified teachers will make it even more difficult to find the 400 or so new ones the federal money will cover.
“We don’t want to get into the same predicament that California had, where they were mandated to hire a large number of new teachers, and they ended up with smaller classes, but they also ended up with a large number of teachers who were not qualified,” Peiffer said.
The U.S. Department of Education will decide how much to give to each school district based on a formula that takes into account both total school-age population and numbers of students in poverty.
In Maryland, Baltimore City will get the largest allocation, around $5.7 million. Prince George’s County will receive the next-largest amount, $2.2 million. But those two districts already experience the most difficulty in finding enough qualified teachers.
“Right here, today, we know we’re sitting on at least 500 openings for next year” even without the new jobs the federally funded teachers represent, said Elizabeth Morgan, chief academic officer for the Baltimore City Public Schools. “We not only have a recruiting issue but a retention issue.”
But Morgan said the city already has strategies in place to help find and keep more good teachers.
“We are being very aggressive about that,” she said. “We’ve sent many more people out to recruit this year,” and the city is also considering hiring bonuses and housing incentives, she said.
Some schools will also face a shortage of classroom space as they seek to add teachers this fall. Those without enough rooms will have to resort to creative solutions.
Sharon Nathanson, a federal liaison for the state education department, said state officials have discussed “different models, where for reading and different subjects they divide kids into sections (within one room) to get the smaller ratio.”
Morgan said Baltimore City will use that type of strategy in some cases to solve the problem of classroom space. “Yes, there are some schools (where) clearly that’s an issue,” she said.
“(If) we hire the additional teachers to be adjunct teachers in classrooms, (they can) work with individual students who need very intensive work, for example a third-grader who’s still not reading,” she said.
Local school officials are restricted in how they may spend the money. It may not be used to hire teachers who have worked in a district before. And almost all of the money must be used to reduce class size in grades 1-3, unless the school already has classes of 18 students or fewer in those grades.
Fay Miller, the assistant superintendent for administration of Kent County Public Schools, said the county already has “a very ambitious program to keep the class size at the elementary level low.” Kent’s greatest need at the moment is for fifth- and sixth-grade teachers, she said, but the county will have to use its share of the money on teachers in lower grades.
Still, Miller said the money — in Kent, $57,000, which will probably fund one full-time and one half-time teacher — is much appreciated.
“For us as a small county, it would be something that would be quite helpful to us,” she said.
Miller said school systems will face another difficulty if Congress does not renew the funding to pay the new teachers’ salaries for a second year. Systems might come to rely on the extra teachers but might have trouble getting state or local funding to keep them on.
“That’s the carrot, I think, that the federal government tries to put out there. They try to get you hooked,” she said.
The state has approved a separate program to help counties hire more teachers to reduce class size. That program might be used to fill the gap in the future if the federal funds dry up, Nathanson said.
Still, despite the hoops counties must jump through to get the funding, no one is really complaining about getting money in the mail.
“Those kinds of things always create problems, but sometimes it’s a nice problem to have,” Miller said. “It’s a nice dilemma.”
