Florida faces a severe shortage of teachers and education support staff professionals, exacerbated by policies that keep wages low and make it harder for educators to focus on what they do best. Thousands of students in Florida start each year without a full time, fully certified educator, with districts relying more and more on long-term substitutes, out of field teachers and outsourcing critical support services. To address this, Florida must offer competitive pay that ensures teachers and staff professionals can live where they work and provide multi-year contracts to retain qualified staff.
Our students suffer when politicians don't meaningfully address the critical teacher and staff shortage.
We go beyond the numbers and look at the root causes of Florida’s teacher and staff shortage.
Teacher shortage numbers make the headlines, but students and school communities are also impacted by shortages of education staff professionals.
One impact of the staff shortage is far too many children don’t have access to mental health services through their schools.
New teacher vacancy numbers show that halfway through the school year there are still 3,197 advertised instructional vacancies across the K-12 system. Thousands of students across the public school system do not currently have access to a qualified, prepared educator.
The recent release of SAT scores shines a much-needed light on how Florida’s attacks on teachers are felt by Florida’s children. In the past seven years, Florida’s average SAT score has dropped by nearly 70 points, and Florida students currently have the 47th lowest average SAT score in the nation. SAT scores don't happen in a vacuum — they exist in a system that is interconnected and that is being failed by bad policy.
Today, the Florida Education Association (FEA) has released the latest data on teacher vacancies in the state of Florida. At the start of a new school year, nearly every district in the state is advertising unfilled positions in Elementary Education, ESE and Speech Language Pathology with no significant improvement in the vacancies for education staff professionals (ESPs).
New teacher vacancy numbers show that halfway through the school year there are still 4096 advertised instructional vacancies in Florida schools and 3457 support staff vacancies, for a total of 7571 vacancies across the K-12 system.
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The Florida Education Association is the state’s largest association of professional employees, with more than 120,000 members. We are affiliated nationally with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA) and the national AFL-CIO.
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