At symposium, Sonoma County educators talk teacher shortage

Once a year the Sonoma County Office of Education asks the trustees from its 40 school boards to decide the most important issue educators face. Whatever they choose becomes the topic of SCOE’s annual fall symposium.

This year, school boards decided to talk about the crippling teacher shortage that districts across the nation face, including how it got to this point and what’s being done to fix it.

SCOE reached out to former State Superintendent Jack O’Connell and Roberta Furger, a researcher at the nonprofit Learning Policy Institute that researches education policy, to address those questions.

During a three-hour meeting Thursday morning at SCOE’s Santa Rosa offices, about ?75 people from school districts throughout the county showed up to hear what they had to say.

Furger said from 2002 to 2014, the number of people enrolling in California teacher preparation programs declined by 76 percent, dropping from more than 75,000 to about 20,000. Pair that with the fact that in the next decade 34.4 percent of Sonoma County teachers are expected to retire - significantly higher than the number of retirements expected statewide - and things in Sonoma County, at first glance, seem pretty bleak. But the prognosis for Sonoma County, according to both O’Connell and Furger, is positive. The two credited Sonoma County districts for proactive steps to fill the looming gap, calling the approach “unique.”

Their recommended fixes for attracting and retaining teachers include nonsalary incentives like affordable housing for teachers, something Santa Rosa City Schools continue to bring closer to reality by reviving the Fir Ridge Drive project. It will create between 36 and 40 low- and moderate-income condominiums for teachers on the district’s vacant 6-acre Fountaingrove property.

Furger and O’Connell also recommended building what they called a local pipeline for creating teachers.

Sonoma County has one of those, too: the North Coast School of Education, where this year its inaugural class of 27 people meets at the Office of Education on Mondays and Thursdays to take credentialing classes. Another tip was to start recruitment earlier. Anticipating the shortage in Sonoma County, Jason Lea, assistant superintendent of human resources for Santa Rosa City Schools, took a more aggressive approach this year to the hiring process, beginning hires in January for the 2015-2016 school year.

“You have an inherent advantage (in Sonoma County) by having institutes of higher learning here,” O’Connell said, explaining why Sonoma County has been so proactive in addressing the shortage. “Your university folks were here talking about ways to attract more prospective teachers in the field.

“The solution has got to be collaborative, and the collaboration with a meeting like this is a step in the right direction.”