Good news for Wake students: Teacher vacancies are down heading into new school year
The Wake County school system will open the school year next week with fewer vacancies than it has seen in recent years.
Figures released on Thursday show that Wake has 235 vacant teaching positions, which is 59 fewer than last August. Wake will open traditional-calendar schools on Tuesday with 98% of its 11,703 teaching positions filled.
“We’re not quite at 100%, and for those reasons, we are continuing to hire,” Kristi Dye-Rhone, Wake’s senior director of talent acquisition, said Thursday. “So as students get closer to the first day of school, you will find that our team is working closely with our building administrators as well as our recruitment team and communications team with making sure that we’re able to staff the schools.”
Dye-Rhone said substitute teachers will cover the vacancies until a permanent replacement is found. She said principals may also shift teachers around to help cover those classes.
Wake also has 103 vacant instructional assistant positions, 14 fewer than a year ago. Wake has filled 96% of the 2,872 instructional assistant positions, or what used to be called teacher assistants.
Vacancy rates remain higher in special-education classes for teachers and instructional assistants than in other classes.
Vacancies not at pre-pandemic levels
Wake, like school districts across the nation, have been finding it more challenging to fill teacher vacancies. Dye-Rhone said the vacancy rate at the start of the school year is still higher than it was before the pandemic.
But Dye-Rhone credits aggressive recruitment efforts and using unique ways, such as advertising on social media, with helping improve the hiring numbers.
”We’ve seen the numbers get better over time, and it is our hope to eventually get to that 100%,” Dye-Rhone sad.
Wake, which is North Carolina’s largest school district, also offers higher pay than most counties.
This year, the district is offering a 4% raise in the local salary supplement for teachers and a 4% raise to support staff. This includes a higher minimum salary of $20 for bus drivers and $17.75 for other non-certified staff.
Also unlike most North Carolina school districts, Wake pays 10% extra to teachers who have a master’s degree. This includes teachers who missed the state’s 2013 cutoff to continue receiving extra master’s degree pay.
Recruiting teachers from within
Wake has helped filled some of its vacant teacher positions by hiring from within through its Future Teachers Program.
The district offers contracts to Wake high school seniors who plan to become teachers after graduating from college. Wake has hired 75 teachers from the program since 2019. It has 118 college students currently in the program.
Emily Brugler joined the program after graduating from Fuquay-Varina High School in 2020. Brugler, 22, graduated from Meredith College in May.
Brugler spent Thursday getting her pre-kndergarten classroom ready at South Lakes Elementary School in Fuquay-Varina. Next week she will be visiting the homes of her students to get to know them and their parents.
“I‘m feeling every single emotion, I think,” Brugler said. “Stress, excited, nervousness, second guessing. But I’m just excited to have them in here. I have 18 wonderful kids that I’m so excited to meet.”
Brugler knows she has both the challenge and the opportunity to give her students a strong foundation.
“It makes me want to be in a job that every day is going to be different,” Brugler said. “I really get to see what they want to learn about and adapt that to them.
“So I think knowing that I’m kind of making a difference, hopefully, like so many teachers in my life. ... That was a big want for me to be back and be a teacher.”
This story was originally published August 22, 2024 at 12:39 PM with the headline "Good news for Wake students: Teacher vacancies are down heading into new school year."
