Amid a national teacher shortage, schools in the South filled vacant teaching positions at a higher rate this school year than other regions in the U.S., new data found.
Information released this week from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that while 88% of Southern schools needed to fill two or more teaching vacancies before the start of the 2024-25 school year — 6 percentage points more than the national average — the region fared better than others when it came to filling those vacancies, with 81% of Southern schools reportedly filling two or more by August. The national average was 74%.
When it came to why Southern schools faced challenges hiring for open positions, 63% blamed having too few candidates, while 71% pointed to a lack of qualified candidates applying. National numbers for those categories were 62% and 64%, respectively.
The Southern region includes Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware and Maryland.
Data broken down by state was not available.
Numbers provided by Louisiana’s Department of Education suggest the state is also making progress. Staffing data for the 2022-23 school year, the most recent year for which data is available, show that teacher hiring increased by 2%, resulting in an additional 1,800 additional educators in the workforce. At the time the data was released, Louisiana had 1,146 teaching vacancies across the state.
During a Legislative hearing in April, Louisiana’s top education official, Cade Brumley, said many of the vacancies were in high-need schools or hard-to-fill subject areas, such as high school math and science, special education and foreign languages.
Public education still faces hiring woes across the U.S. NCES data shows that the majority of the country’s K-12 public schools experienced difficulty hiring fully certified teachers heading into the current academic year.
According to the data, public schools had an average of six teaching vacancies, with 74% reporting having trouble filling those vacancies with qualified teachers before classes began — a drop from the 79% that reported the same during the 2023-24 school year.
Despite slight gains, “there is still room for improvement,” NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said in a news release.
Nowhere were staffing shortages felt most acutely, however, than in special education. According to data, 74% of public elementary and middle schools reported struggling to hire qualified candidates for those roles. Nonteaching vacancies, including transportation staff and tutors, were also difficult to hire, with schools managing to fill just 64% of their nonteaching staff vacancies.
“Those staff are just as important to students’ overall education experience,” Carr said.
