Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley told the Senate Education Committee the number of teacher vacancies in the classroom statewide has been cut in half in one year from 25-hundred to 12-hundred. Brumley says legislation approved by lawmakers this year helped.
“So individuals with a master’s degree in any field can go into the classroom and with five years of successful teaching experience they can certify…another initiative is the retire-rehire legislation, so we think that has helped bring some of the individuals back into the classroom,” said Brumley.
But Brumley says a backlog of teacher certification applications has grown past 7,000 as there are not enough state workers to process them.
“We are seeing more applications than we have historically seen coming in for us to process, all the while we have not expanded the number of bodies that service those applications, because we did not want to grow as an agency,” said Brumley.
Brumley says they’ve brought in some part-time help to reduce the backlog, but another major issue is that laws concerning teacher certification are complex.
“We don’t have the manpower and it’s not like I can go work harder or faster, because these people are processing 14,000 applications a year,” said Brumley.
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