Utah school districts face teacher shortage

New school clothes? Check.

Paper and pencils? Check.

Backpack? Check.

Teachers?

Teachers...?

Well, how about a substitute?

As a half-million Utah children return to class over the next week, a few of them could be greeted by a sub.

Jordan, Alpine, Davis and Salt Lake City school districts combined reported nearly 150 teacher vacancies as late as Thursday.

Those numbers are in flux, Jordan spokeswoman Melinda Colton notes. Positions could be filled by the time your child returns to school.

The numbers nevertheless shed light on a national teacher shortage hitting Utah. School district bosses say they're getting creative in recruiting and keeping teachers in a profession that's become, for rookies at least, a revolving door.

But that's getting harder, too. The issue largely comes down to money. And in a state that spends the least per student in the country, districts don't have much of it. At least one district boss, however, thinks that tide is turning.

The nation's schools have struggled with a teacher shortage for years. Utah was hit last fall, when 17 of 40 school districts started the school year without enough teachers to go around, according to the Utah Foundation's Teacher Attrition report issued last month.

Those numbers could rise.

Utah's student enrollment is expected to grow from 540,000 to more than 680,000 students by 2014. At the same time, Utah will need 44,000 new teachers, according to a Utah Educator Supply and Demand study by Utah State University.

Yet fewer people want to become teachers. The number of new teachers graduating from Utah colleges and universities dropped 13 percent between 2003 and 2006, the Utah Foundation reports.

And about half of those who do become teachers quit within the first five years. Of Utah's some 9,000 new teachers licensed between 2000 and 2004, fewer than half remained in Utah public schools by the 2004-05 school year, the supply and demand study states.

"Anytime you have increased enrollment and decreased output of certified teachers, that's a collision course," said Marshall Topham, assistant superintendent over secondary education in Washington School District.

Indeed, Alpine District was 48 teachers short, and that's after hiring 525 as of Tuesday, Alpine School District spokeswoman Jerrilyn Mortensen said in an e-mail to the Deseret Morning News. Of those, 24 were in elementary schools, two in junior high, three high school, and 19 special education.