As 2023-24 school year starts Monday, CMS is still short more than 500 teachers
With just days remaining before the start of the new school year, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officials are still trying to fill hundreds of open teacher vacancies.
In a media briefing on Wednesday, district officials said there are currently more than 500 teacher openings in CMS, along with positions in transportation, custodial and school nutrition departments.
“It is extremely difficult to hire and retain teachers, any educators, right now,” said CMS Superintendent Crystal Hill. “The cost of living combined with staffing shortages across our region has made it extremely difficult for us to recruit and retain staff from all different areas.”
Impact of CMS staffing shortages
As it currently stands, there are 516 vacant teaching positions, 34 open bus driver slots and 156 open cafeteria staff positions across 184 schools, according to CMS.
CMS schools have been dealing with staffing shortages for years. Ahead of the 2022-23 school year, there were 390 teacher vacancies and only 53 of its 181 schools were fully staffed, The Charlotte Observer previously reported.
Staffing shortages aren’t isn’t just an issue in Charlotte. Schools across the country are trying to fill more open positions than usual, one of the major challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There was a prediction that we would have a decline in the number of educators that are coming out of our institutions of higher education so the pipeline has certainly decreased and then you add in COVID, which just made that impact even larger,” Kecia Coin, chief human resources officer for CMS, told The Observer. “There are less people who are going into that as a career, which then impacts all of the districts who are trying to hire.”
Hill said about 200 teachers are in the process of being hired to help stem the CMS shortage while the district makes adjustments.
“Just like districts across the nation and across our state, we do have some vacant positions and we are still looking for good candidates to join our family,” Coin said. “Regardless of the number of vacancies, CMS is committed to providing a high quality educational experience for every child.”
To prepare for the upcoming school year, CMS principals have been working with learning community superintendents to develop plans to accommodate students’ needs depending on staffing shortages within each school, such as teachers using technology to instruct groups of students while floating between classes with the help of another staff member.
“They have been trying every strategy possible to ensure that our students have an adult in the classroom on day one, and so we’ll continue working with HR with the vacancies that we have,” said Jason Carson, the chief school performance officer for CMS.
District officials say they are also carrying out a plan to address bus driver shortages in addition to the new bus stop plan being rolled out this year, called Express Stops, designed to cut down on two-hour ride times and costs.
[RELATED: Parents asked. Did CMS listen? 4 things to know about controversial bus stop plan]
“We did that as a means to make sure that we can maintain services we have while also providing a more efficient and a faster route for students,” Brian Schultz, chief operations officer for CMS, said. “They spend less time on the bus and more time being able to do after school activities, engaging in their school work besides riding on the bus.”
This story was originally published August 25, 2023 at 10:07 AM.
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