According to Data Ohio, nearly 300,000 people worked in education in the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent year available. About 11,000 of those worked in busing, compared to more than 100,600 teachers.
While the number of teachers who have been going into the profession in Ohio is declining and school districts have said they are seeing fewer applications, most districts have enough teachers. There are some niches that are harder to find, though, including special education and science.
“I think there are simply more vacancies across the region than licensed staff to fill certain areas, and we continue seeing fewer staff in those areas,” said Huber Heights City Schools Superintendent Jason Enix.
The reputation of kids as being badly behaved and comparatively low pay for some positions, along with special licenses required, are among the reasons why districts say staff for some positions can be harder to find.
Paraprofessionals
Like other industries, schools are struggling to fill lower-wage jobs.
This includes paraprofessionals who work with students who need additional assistance. Ohio has a permit for these employees but they only need a high school degree.
“Typically, they are one of the lowest paid positions in a school district, and so most school districts are competing with McDonald’s, Costco, Amazon, because those individuals can make more money working in those other sectors and not necessarily deal with challenging children,” Cox said.
Districts have instead been offering other perks, Cox said. For example, at the MCESC, high-quality paraprofessionals can qualify for tuition reimbursement after three years, and they’re encouraged to become teachers.
Offering training to paraprofessionals has also helped, Cox said, ensuring they are more prepared for the situations they may be in.
Kenny Jones, the president of the Ohio Association of Public School Employees Local 643, which represents Dayton Public Schools paraprofessionals, said one of the reasons it’s hard to keep paraprofessionals is the low pay.
In DPS, paraprofessionals often go on to become bus drivers or teachers, depending on what part of the district they work in, Jones said. Either way, that person is likely to make more money.
Jones said DPS helped its staff by raising the number of hours worked to eight guaranteed hours a day. That meant the pay rose too, he said.
Dayton Public is paying some paraprofessionals $18 per hour, according to the hiring documents on the district’s board agenda.
Terry Graves-Strieter, Greene County Educational Service Center superintendent and a former special education director, said more districts hired paraprofessional and special education staff post-pandemic as more kids had difficulty regulating their emotions after being at home for several months.
She stressed the people who do this work should be ones who love it.
“We want people who know the kind of job that it is and have a passion for those kinds of students who need that extra help,” she said.
Bus drivers
Bus drivers in Ohio are required to have a commercial driver’s license.
“As a bus driver, there is an intense amount of responsibility and the process to obtain a Class ‘B’ CDL is rather involved,” said Jordan Parker, Fairborn City Schools transportation supervisor.
Truck drivers also need the license, and the pay for a truck driver is significantly higher than a bus driver. The commercial driver’s license shortage isn’t expected to peak until 2030, according to industry professionals.
On top of that, driving a bus full of other peoples’ kids in traffic early in the morning and late in the afternoon can be difficult.
The hours are also odd for bus drivers as the day is split between an early morning and mid-afternoon. That means bus drivers are only working six hours a day in a lot of districts, which doesn’t always add up to 40 hours per week.
Doug Palmer, senior transportation consultant at the Ohio School Boards Association, which works with public school officials across Ohio, said the lack of bus drivers, along with the requirement that public schools bus the kids that live in their district to and from private and community schools, has made the shortage worse.
It’s more common to see public schools start earlier or later to accommodate the private school bus times.
Palmer said it’s also more common for districts to pay parents to transport their kids to nonpublic schools or eliminate high school busing.
Several superintendents noted they are all competing for the same limited number of drivers.
“Most of the time, you are taking drivers from other school districts which then poses a challenge for the district they came from,” said Chad Wyen, Mad River schools superintendent.
Palmer noted the bus driver shortage has been ongoing and started even before the pandemic.
“This is not new anymore,” Palmer said. “It’s fallen off the radar, but it’s important.”
Special education
There has been a slight increase in the number of kids identified as special needs.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of kids identified under a federal law meant to provide additional services for them has risen from 13% to 15% between the 2012-2013 school year and the 2022-2023 school year.
According to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, the number of students in Ohio with disabilities jumped from 272,069 in the 2018-2019 school year to 279,546 students in the 2022-2023 school year, about a one percent increase in those five years.
Combine that with fewer teachers going into the profession and it is easy to see why schools may have a hard time attracting special education teachers.
Oakwood, Centerville and Beavercreek, all school districts that don’t have a lot of trouble filling vacancies, reported that some of the hardest teachers to find were special education teachers.
Graves-Strieter said exposure is the key to getting more people into special education and intervention services.
“When I was a special ed director, we had a peer program,” she said. “Those students who ended up going into that program and helping during their study hall in the special ed resource room, they ended up going into the special ed field.”
Substitutes
Teachers and bus drivers might be hard to find, but the district must find substitutes for those positions too.
Historically, retired teachers stayed involved as substitutes. But there are fewer of those people interested now.
Ohio opened other pathways for substitute teachers during the pandemic when the need for substitute teachers was especially high. Now, substitute teachers only need a high school diploma to be able to work in a school.
Substitutes are often a way into a full-time job, districts said.
“Student teachers and substitute teachers are often the first to apply for a teaching job after having had a positive experience in the school district and forming relationships with staff and students,” West Carrollton spokeswoman Janine Corbett said.
Staffing changes
Due to federal COVID-19 funds ending in September and several districts having levies fail, multiple schools are headed back this fall with fewer staff than last year.
Centerville, Northmont, Vandalia and Tipp City are among those who had to make cuts after levies failed.
Cox said the cuts meant that people left some districts and went to others, which could have helped staffing levels across the board. But she noted that the leniency in licensing has been another factor in helping staff levels.
Several districts said increased enrollment has led to a need for more staff, and those districts are more rural ones. Troy, Huber Heights, Lebanon and Fairborn are some of the districts who reported more needs and more staff.
“We increased instructional staff to provide more specialized support to students and counselors to address student’s mental health needs,” said Pam Gayheart, spokeswoman for Fairborn schools.
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