With a teacher shortage hitting many Bay Area districts hard, San Francisco started the school year Monday with a shortfall of 38 teachers despite the district’s summer-long scramble to find enough candidates to fill its classrooms.

A year ago, every classroom in the district had a permanent teacher on the first day of school, although resignations and other vacancies created openings during the school year, district officials said. The district employs about 3,300 teachers.

It could have been worse this year. But because the number of resignations and retirements dropped, the district needed to fill just 619 teaching positions, down from 651 a year ago.

Despite the current shortage, district officials stressed that every classroom had a qualified teacher Monday, with fully credentialed staffers in the central office or in other nonclassroom positions stepping in to cover the unfilled positions.

“We wanted to make sure we got the school year off to a good start,” said Superintendent Richard Carranza, who added that the unfilled positions are scattered across the district, many of them in high schools and special education classes.

But using district staff to cover the openings isn’t a long-term solution, the superintendent said. Some openings could be filled by long-term substitutes if necessary in coming weeks.

The district focused its hiring efforts on schools that have typically struggled to fill positions, including many that serve a disproportionate number of disadvantaged students, Carranza said. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, for example, was fully staffed because of those efforts, the superintendent said as he toured the Portola neighborhood school Monday morning.

“That’s huge,” he said.

Many of the openings are the result of last-minute resignations by teachers and administrators, district officials said. Last week, the district filled 52 positions, but added 23 openings to the list because of those departures.

Carranza had hoped to head off such late resignations by requiring teachers who said they wanted to stay to sign a contract last spring that committed them to teach this year. Anyone who violated that contract could be reported to the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which could sanction the teachers or revoke their credentials.

Back to Gallery SF public schools start year a few teachers short 3 1 of 3 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 2 of 3 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 3 of 3 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle





While other districts have used that strong-arm technique to retain teachers, this was the first year San Francisco decided to compel teachers to stay if they said they would be back, Carranza said. Eight teachers who violated that contract will be reported to the commission for review, he said.

The post-recession teacher shortage has hit many Bay Area districts hard, with both urban and suburban schools competing for qualified applicants, especially in hard-to-fill areas like special education, bilingual education, math and science.

San Ramon Unified had about five openings on the first day of school Monday, out of about 2,000 teachers.

Yet the supply of new teachers across the state is at a 12-year low, according to the Learning Policy Institute, a nonpartisan education research organization.

In 2008, almost 45,000 people were enrolled in teacher preparation programs in California. By 2013, there were fewer than 20,000, according to the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Last year, the commission said, districts hired about 21,500 new teachers, while the state issued just 18,100 new credentials.

Several districts, including San Francisco, offered signing bonuses and other perks to lure candidates, while Oakland was looking for bilingual teacher candidates in Spain and Mexico.

Pittsburg Unified offered $5,000 for teachers with bilingual, special education, math and science credentials and another $5,000 to teachers who had graduated from a district high school.

But the East Bay district still had about 10 teaching positions to fill by the first day of school Wednesday, about the same as last year, said Superintendent Janet Schulze. The district employs about 550 teachers overall.

“Because of the shortage, we’ve had to do more waivers and hire interns,” she said, adding that a new mentoring program will help support those new and less-experienced teachers. “I think it’s just been more challenging this year and last year too.”

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker