Last Updated on January 23, 2024, 10:40 PM | Published: January 23, 2024
OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma has set a new record this school year for issuing emergency teaching certifications, a sign the state’s teacher shortage has progressed.
The state issued a new all-time high of 4,676 emergency certifications from June through December, representing teaching hires for the 2023-24 school year. The previous record was set last school year with 4,574.
The certificates permit a person with at least a bachelor’s degree to work in public schools without having any teacher training in the grade level or subject area they want to teach.
The number of emergency certifications has skyrocketed over the past decade as a teacher shortage deepened. Oklahoma issued 189 in the 2013-14 school year.
What was once viewed as a stop-gap measure has become integral to public schools’ ability to staff their classrooms. Schools also are increasingly hiring adjunct teachers with no form of certification, and laws governing adjunct teaching hours have been relaxed.
Teaching positions that used to attract 40 applicants now draw two or three, said Chuck McCauley, superintendent of Bartlesville Public Schools.
“If there weren’t emergency certified teachers, we would not be able to have school,” McCauley said. “Teachers with those traditional certificates just aren’t there.”
Bartlesville schools hired 57 teachers with emergency certifications this school year, including 19 who are new to teaching. The others are in their second or third year with an emergency certification or are certified to teach other grade levels or subjects, McCauley said.
The school district hosts a New Teacher Academy to give its emergency certified hires extra training and observation of veteran teachers. These programs have become more necessary as the number of teachers new to the classroom has grown.
“We’ll have to continue to invest in our staff to not only be able to recruit those people but, more importantly, to be able to train them to be effective in the classroom and then to retain them,” McCauley said.
Over the past four years, state lawmakers passed teacher pay raises, invested more money into public schools and added scholarship incentives for education majors in Oklahoma colleges. However, the teacher shortage predates many of these initiatives.
About 30,000 teachers left Oklahoma’s public school system between 2012 and 2018. Meanwhile, the number of people studying to become teachers fell nationwide since 2010, most steeply in Oklahoma.
State Superintendent Ryan Walters has offered signing bonuses to teachers willing to return to the profession or who would move to Oklahoma from out of state. He suggested the state Legislature invest $10 million to give signing bonuses of $10,000 to $15,000 for tough-to-fill positions like secondary science and math.
Walters’ “Back to Basics” plan also proposes spending $22 million on bonuses for teachers whose students show academic growth in reading and math and $15 million to pay teachers for tutoring in those two subjects.
Walters pointed to the high rate of emergency certifications and low enrollment in colleges of education as signals of Oklahoma’s ongoing teacher shortage.
“I don’t want you to hear from me that this magically solves the teacher shortage,” Walters said while presenting his budget ideas to House lawmakers on Jan. 10. “It does not. What it does do is it allows us to target some of the most difficult-to-staff areas with some targeted funds. I do believe it has helped.”
Republished in partnership with Oklahoma Voice under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Oklahoma Voice is a part of States Newsroom which is a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: [email protected]. Follow Oklahoma Voice on Facebook and Twitter.
Nuria Martinez-Keel covers education for Oklahoma Voice and can be found at @NuriaMKeel on X (Twitter). She worked in newspapers for six years, more than four of which she spent at The Oklahoman covering education and courts. Nuria is an Oklahoma State University graduate.
