Cathryn Creno

The Republic | azcentral.com

Casa Grande schools has hired 11 teachers from the Philippines this year

There are more than 500 unfilled teaching positions statewide

Low pay and stressful working conditions blamed for the teacher shortage

Shannon Goodsell was downright scared when he saw the number of teacher openings.

The superintendent of the 3,800-student Casa Grande Union High School District had 19 faculty openings at the end of last school year. He had no applicants, not even a resume from a new college graduate.

"When you have no applicants in your job pool, it is scary," he said.

Low pay and tough new expectations for teachers have led to a shortage of qualified people willing to take jobs in Arizona's classrooms. Arizona has approximately 95,000 certified teachers, but only about 52,000 are teaching this year, according to the Arizona Department of Education.

At the start of the summer, Goodsell hired a few recent graduates from out-of-state education colleges.

Next, he began Skyping with high-school math and science teachers in the Philippines who had applied for work visas to teach in the United States.

He selected 11.

"They have master's degrees and most have bachelor's degrees in the subjects that they teach," Goodsell said. "It has been working very well."

The Filipino teachers appear to be adjusting to life in small-town Arizona and American-style teaching, including creative teaching methods required by the Arizona College and Career Ready Standards.

On a recent morning at Casa Grande Union High School, chemistry teacher Ma.Dulce Palomares snapped her fingers to get students' attention and then called on them to shout out loud.

"Everyone say, 'I BELIEVE! I BELIEVE!' " she said, starting a call and response with students.

"Believe in YOURSELVES!"

She then led students into a contest involving their mastery of the periodic table of elements.

The state Education Department does not officially track open teaching positions. Observers say there are more than 500 open positions statewide, based on job postings and a recent Arizona Association of School Administrators survey.

The association surveyed members at the start of the school year and found 64 districts had lost about 2,100 teachers after last school year. At the start of this school year, the districts that responded to the survey were still seeking about 400 teachers to fill openings.

Observers likeDeb Duvall, executive director of the school administrators association, and Mari Koerner, dean of Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, say that because the economy has improved, many are leaving teaching for jobs that pay more and are less stressful.

"You can do almost anything else for $30,000," Koerner said.

"Your salary is a sign of how much you are valued. A low salary means you are not valued, that you are easily replaceable."

In 2012, the most-recent year for which numbers were available, the average starting salary for an Arizona public-school teacher was $31,874, according to the Arizona Education Association, the state's branch of the National Education Association.

This year, Casa Grande Union's starting salary for a teacher with a bachelor's degree is $33,550. The Phoenix Union High School District, among the highest-paying in the state, pays starting teachers $38,828.

Duvall said increasing pressure on teachers to spend time collecting student-performance data and drilling students to perform well on standardized tests also is driving some from the profession.

"Many people go into teaching because they want to interact with students," she said. "But there is less time for that."

Exacerbating the problem are baby-boomer retirements. Many teachers in their 50s and 60s took teaching jobs in the 1980s, the heyday of the Valley's growth, and now are eligible to retire.

About 21,000 teachers have retired from district and charter jobs in the last five years, according to the school administrators association.

Cecilia Johnson, the Arizona Department of Education's associate superintendent for highly effective teachers and leaders, said educators are so worried about filling open teaching positions that her department has created a task force to seek solutions. It will make its first presentation to the Arizona State Board of Education this month.

Goodsell said rural districts like Casa Grande Union struggle because many young teachers want to work in metropolitan areas. Although Casa Grande is about a 30-minute drive from the Valley, it lacks the social scene of places like Scottsdale, Tempe, Glendale and Phoenix.

But social life was not on the mind of Rizza Casabuena, who left a private-school teaching position in the Philippines and moved to Casa Grande to teach math in August. She and the 10 other Filipino teachers share apartments, meals and avoid car expenses by riding with a retired U.S. Marine who has volunteered to take them to and from school.

Casabuena said the teachers' goals are to learn about American culture and education — and to put away money for the future. Casa Grande Union pays them the same amount it pays all other teachers on its faculty, which is more than five times what they were making in the Philippines, she said.

Casabuena also said teaching in Casa Grande is easier than her previous job in the Philippines. The district has a prepared math curriculum so teachers don't need to put together nightly lesson plans.

"It was very easy to accept the job," she said.

To become qualified to teach in the United States, Casabuena and her colleagues had to obtain three-year work visas from the federal government as well as foreign teaching certificates from the state education department.

The Filipino teachers learned about Casa Grande Union's need for teachers through Avenida International Consultants, Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based agency that connects workers in the Philippines with American education and health-care employers.

Through the agency, they showed videos of their teaching skills and interviewed with Goodsell via Skype before accepting the jobs.

Ligaya Avenida, chief executive officer of the California company, said the original mission was a cultural exchange program for international teachers and American schools. Only in the last few years has she started to provide a solution to some districts' teacher shortages.

Other rural Arizona districts that have hired Filipino teachers with assistance from Avenida's company include the Bullhead City Elementary School District, the Colorado River Union High School District and the Toltec Elementary School District.

But Andrew Morrill, president of the Arizona Education Association, said hiring international teachers is not a permanent solution to the state's teacher shortage.

"If we are going all the way across the world when we have qualified teachers right here in Arizona, we should be asking why they are leaving," he said.

Valley schools teacher shortage

Arizona educators say Valley schools this fall have an unusually large number of open teaching positions.

Several large Valley school districts are using long-term substitutes and teachers-in-training because they can't find teachers with the right credentials to permanently fill the jobs.

• Mesa Public Schools and the Peoria Unified School District: 25 openings.

• Phoenix Union High School District: 21 openings.

• Deer Valley Unified School District: 10 openings.

• Scottsdale and Higley unified districts: 5 openings.

Republic reporters Jackee Coe and Mark Olalde contributed to this report.