After six years of anemic hiring, Oregon school districts will extend job offers to an estimated 2,000 teachers this year – a turnaround that has energized those doing the hiring as well as those securing jobs.

"It's a lot of work, but this is a great year for us," said Keith Hathorne, a human resources manager helping Oregon's largest district, Portland Public Schools, hire nearly 400 teachers this spring.

Logan Heyerly, a University of Portland senior who will soon be licensed to teach science and math, said every recruiter she's talked to has remarked on her good timing.

"I feel so fortunate," she said. "Teaching young people how to learn is the most important thing you can do."

From 2009 to 2012, with state funding flat and health insurance and retirement costs rising, Oregon schools shed 3,600 teaching jobs, 12 percent of the teacher workforce. Rather than hire new blood, human resources officers worked furiously to try to keep existing teachers on staff – a feat that was not always possible.

As human resources director for Beaverton schools, Mark Moser had his name on hundreds of pink slips handed out to teachers there in 2012, including some former students whom he had encouraged to enter the classroom. "It was ugly," he says.

Moser now oversees human resources for North Clackamas School District, which cut 24 percent of its teaching force over five years and will add back modestly for the first time this fall.

Jim Buck, who organizes a huge educator job fair held in Portland each April, predicts those hires will be among at least 2,000 if not more that Oregon school districts will make this spring and summer.

Districts are hiring big, both to fill newly created jobs and to replace retirees.

Most are adding positions, although not nearly as many as they have cut since 2007, human resource officers say.

Retirements also are creating a lot of job openings, they say. Many teachers who reached retirement age over the past several years kept working because of economic uncertainty but now feel confident enough about their finances to retire.

That sea change in the job market should rejuvenate teaching's image as a profession in which idealistic college grads can find steady paychecks and good benefits while making a difference for the next generation, educators say.

"The word needs to change. The trend is definitely that districts throughout the West and throughout the country are looking for qualified candidates," said Chuck White, executive director of the Oregon School Personnel Association.

"The story has changed so quickly" and for the better, said Sharon Chinn, who helps students in Lewis & Clark College's master's in education program find teaching jobs.

After years of turning away applicants by the hundreds, some Oregon districts may find themselves unable to fill all their openings – certainly in hard-to-staff areas such as special education, advanced math and bilingual education, but even in normally oversupplied areas such as language arts, White said.

If all those who graduated from Oregon's many teacher preparation programs in the past five years but were unable to find teacher jobs were to apply this year, there would be an oversupply, he and others said.

The big question is: Do they still want to teach or have they taken their skills elsewhere, never to return to an Oregon school?

"There is a possibility we have lost out on some real qualified teachers just because of the economics of the hiring cycle," White said.

The lack of jobs discouraged young people from considering teaching as a career. Schools of education in Oregon shrank rapidly as college students got the message that pursing a teacher's license was sure to build student loan debt but unlikely to get them a job, at least in Oregon. One program, the school of education at Willamette University, closed entirely.

This year, Oregon colleges and universities will graduate about 1,500 new teachers – a stark one-third less than in 2009, said Keith Menk, deputy director of Oregon's teacher licensing agency.

But leaders of colleges of education say they are optimistic their programs will stabilize and even grow as word gets out that teachers are in demand.

School districts say they want discouraged recent education graduates to know they're wanted.

"Before the economy tanked, if I saw a teacher come in who had finished their program and done student teaching and there was nothing on their resume related to teaching for three years, I would be wondering why," said Moser, the North Clackamas human resources executive director. "Now, that is not a filter I would apply or that anyone would apply. We know it's not that something is wrong with that candidate. They got caught up in a terrible economy."

Susan Rodriguez, Beaverton schools' administrator for licensed personnel, said her district is snapping up any substitute teachers it can find right now and will hire as many as 200 teachers for the fall. She says she congratulates aspiring teachers looking for jobs this spring on their great timing -- but then tells them they are jumping into a "saturated pool" that contains graduates from the past several years.

"I tell them, 'Yes, we are hiring, but you'd better bring your A game.'"

-- Betsy Hammond

betsyhammond@oregonian.com