Teacher shortage looms as student growth soars

A wave of students coming in the next 20 years will be difficult for Utah schools to withstand when their teachers are weathered and ready to bail out.

The average Utah schoolteacher is 50 years old and not far from boarding the ship to retirement — at the rate of more than 1,000 a year over the next decade, according to a new Utah State University study on teacher supply and demand.

Factor in enrollment growth and other considerations, and Utah is going to have a teacher shortage, estimated at 1,175 teachers a year, for the next 20 years.

The way things look now, it will be sink or swim for Utah school districts, the Utah Office of Education, and Utah's teaching colleges. And some say that elusive dollar bills would be their best life preserver.

"If our mature educators (leave) the profession and new educators can't afford to stay, what's going to happen?" said Joan Patterson, educator licensing coordinator for the Utah Office of Education.

The 2003-04 Utah Educator Supply and Demand Study was conducted by USU's instructional technology department for the Utah Office of Education and Utah Board of Regents.

It is based on numbers provided by the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget, the state office of education, and district questionnaires.

The study projects Utah student enrollment, now about 480,000, to grow by nearly 50 percent in 20 years. That wave will require 11,800 new teachers.

Attrition increases that need.

Utah public schools currently lose and rehire 2,777 teachers every year. Teacher retirements account for 663 vacancies a year. But in the next 10 years, annual retirements are expected to rise to more than 1,000 teachers, considering more than 10,000 teachers are older than 50, the biggest age group in the profession. That will bringing annual attrition to 3,381 teachers.

That gap, plus an annual 571 teachers needed each year for growth, will leave an average 1,175 teaching vacancies each year. Critical shortages are cropping up in speech pathology, advanced math and special education.

Utah school districts overwhelmingly look to local teaching colleges to fill the voids.

But considering just half of the 3,600 teachers coming out of Utah colleges actually go to work in Utah schools, colleges would need to churn out an extra 2,350 new teachers a year to meet the coming need, the study states.

Also at play are other factors.