Alabama is suffering a serious teacher shortage.

“Nearly every district---it’s easy to say every district---has been impacted by this shortage,” Alabama Deputy Superintendent Jeff Langham told state school board members Thursday in Montgomery.

A statewide task force composed of 18 education officials—mostly superintendents—has been working since January to make recommendations on how to deal with the shortage.

Langham presented the board with 33 recommendations—23 for recruiting teachers and 10 for retaining them. The group's suggestions deal with everything from raising teacher pay to extending temporary teaching certificates to revamping retirement benefits.

“Everything seemed important, so it was hard to prioritize,” Langham told board members during the work session. Getting new teachers in the pipeline isn’t the only problem. Keeping them in teaching is difficult, too. According to the task force, 8% of teachers leave the profession every year.

Roanoke Superintendent Chuck Marcum chaired the task force and told AL.com the set of recommendations is “a tool kit” and a variety of steps are needed. “I don’t think there’s a silver bullet,” Marcum said.

State board member Dr. Cynthia McCarty, R-Jacksonville, said the problem has grown.

When she joined the board in 2014, she said, “(the shortage) was primarily upper-level math teachers, physics and chemistry teachers and special education.”

“Now, it’s not just those teachers,” McCarty said. “It’s even elementary school teachers.”

“We see these critical shortages just kind of expanding every year,” Langham said, and Alabama isn’t the only place shortages are a problem. “It’s really of epidemic proportions nationwide.”

Traditional paths to becoming a teacher—through a college-level teacher preparation program—aren’t providing enough teachers to replace those leaving, Marcum said.

“A lot of teachers are going to have to come from alternative routes,” Marcum said, like those who want to become teachers after working in a different field. The task force recommended easing the path somewhat for those on alternative pathways.

Marcum said the task force isn’t trying to make it easier to be a teacher but removing barriers for those who want to teach is important with a dwindling pool of candidates.

“You don’t just want a warm body,” he said. “But you still have to have someone at the head of the class.”

Recommendations also include improving the public image of teachers. “Sometimes we’re our own worst enemy,” Marcum said, “because we don’t do a good job promoting the good things teachers do."

The committee also suggested recruiting students while they’re in high school through dual enrollment, allowing them to earn college credit toward becoming a teacher.

The full report with all recommendations can be seen at the end of this article.

Marcum said his district in Roanoke is feeling the shortage, too. “We’re at the tipping point because of the age of our faculty,” he said. Of the 100 certified people working in the district’s schools, he said, 19 have enough years under their belt to retire. If they all retire, he’d be hard-pressed to replace them, he said.

Another problem, Langham said, is the number of teachers teaching a subject they don’t have a major or minor in themselves, known as teaching “out of field.”

According to state data, during the 2017-18 school year, nearly 2,800 teachers were teaching out of field. That’s nearly 6% of the state’s 46,565 teachers. Male teachers are more than twice as likely to be teaching out of field as female teachers. Statewide, 9.5% of male teachers are teaching out of field, while 4.4% of female teachers are.

However, in 36 schools across the state, more than one out of every three teachers is teaching out of field.

More evidence of the shortage, Langham said, is that nearly every Alabama school district has hired teachers who are working under provisional or emergency certificates, meaning they aren’t certified but are working toward full certification.

Such provisional or emergency certificates can be used to help find teachers for hard-to-fill subjects, like chemistry or foreign languages, or remote geographic areas.

In the 2017-18 school year, 441 teachers were teaching through an emergency certificate, and 665 were using provisional certificates. That’s 2.4% of all teachers in Alabama.

The 70 schools where 10% or more of the teachers were using emergency or provisional certificates during the 2017-18 school year were all middle and high schools, according to state data.

Marcum said one of the task force’s recommendations was to extend the length of time a teacher could work under an emergency certificate. Lawmakers did that last spring while the task force’s work was underway, allowing an emergency certificate to be held for up to four years.

Low salaries and a cut in retirement benefits during the recession a decade ago added to the problem, Langham said. The creation of a new set of retirement benefits, called Tier 3, was rejected by the Senate as too costly, but Marcum said they’ll be back at the table during the next legislative session.

Lawmakers raised the starting salary for Alabama teachers above $40,000 for the first time this year. The task force didn’t recommend any specific amount by which to raise teacher salaries.

If the board votes in November to accept the recommendations, a new group, the Teacher Quantity and Quality Roundtable, will consider how to put the recommendations into action, Marcum said.