International hires & ‘grow your own’ programs: Schools seek solutions to teacher shortage

Oglala Lakota County schools had zero applications for more than 25 open teacher positions earlier this year.

Superintendent Connie Kaltenbach said the school district advertised the positions for months locally, across the state and nationally. But there weren’t any bites.

So she turned to the international market. Starting this fall, 26 Filipino teachers will likely join the southwestern South Dakota school district – which is roughly 14% of the current certified staff in the district. 

Oglala Lakota isn’t the only school district in the state to turn up zero applicants for a teaching position. Schools across the state — ranging from rural districts to larger schools — face a teacher shortage.

As of the end of June, the South Dakota Teacher Placement Center showed 410 teacher openings in the state were unfilled. Nearly 70 of those positions were for special education or early childhood education positions. South Dakota had 10,699 public school teachers in 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

If districts don’t fill those positions, they could be forced to increase student to teacher ratios, which could risk safety and increase stress in classrooms; fill classrooms with teaching aids to step in for qualified teachers; or close and consolidate schools throughout the district.

“It’s like going to the doctor and sitting in the ER hoping to get cured, but a doctor never shows up,” said Rob Monson, executive director of School Administrators of South Dakota. “You might get a nurse, but you don’t actually have that experienced, trained and certified doctor you were expecting.”

School districts, state agencies and educators across South Dakota are taking steps to address the teacher shortage — both immediately and in the long term. Methods include hiring teachers internationally, offering workforce housing in rural and tribal areas, encouraging applications to a state program to convert paraprofessionals into teachers, and recruiting high school students to enter the teaching profession.

But Monson described those as “stopgap measures.”

More needs to be done to regain respect for the profession in South Dakota — including removing political pressures on teachers and administrators, and competing with surrounding states regarding teacher salaries and money invested in schools, Monson said.

Any of those efforts will likely take a decade before South Dakota starts to make headway on its teacher shortage, he added.

“There is no silver bullet in any of this,” Monson said. “It’s a lot of different ideas and plans and trial and error.”

Professional work visas offer short term solution for teacher needs

The Filipinos starting at Oglala Lakota this year aren’t the only international teachers in the state. Dozens are used in other school districts such as Todd, Bennett and Sisseton.

The international hires have been a resource used by public and private schools for years through the J-1 visa program, which is a cultural exchange program allowing international college students, researchers, teachers and other professionals to live and work in the United States for a limited amount of time. Teachers are allowed up to five years in the United States. There is no cap on the number of J-1 visas the country awards each year.

At Oglala Lakota, the school district hires the teachers through a third party company, Teach Quest — at no cost to the school aside from paying the international teachers their salaries, Kaltenbach said. The company operates in South Dakota, California, Arizona, Oregon and New Mexico, though Teach Quest did not respond to questions about how many teachers are based in South Dakota and how the operation is funded.

And because of the program, the district has 20 to 30 applications to pick from rather than one or two applications for a position.

“I don’t think we have enough people currently in our state to fill the pipeline and open positions,” Monson said. “It’s awfully tough to incentivize someone from Montana, Minnesota or Wyoming to come to South Dakota and be a teacher with our pay. Unless they’re moving home or their spouse is moving to South Dakota, there are lots of reasons why someone wouldn’t want to come to South Dakota to teach.”

The average teacher salary is $53,628 in Montana (44th in the nation), $64,184 in Minnesota (18th), and $60,819 in Wyoming (23rd), according to the National Educators Association. The average teacher salary in South Dakota is $50,592, which is 49th in the nation. Mississippi is last at $47,902.

Most of the incoming Filipino teachers have master’s degrees, Kaltenbach said. They’ve all been teaching for at least two years and speak proficient English, she added.

The average base salary for a teacher in the Philippines is 274,801 Philippine pesos per year, according to Indeed — about $5,000 a year. The starting salary at Oglala Lakota County Schools is $53,580 — and with the experience most of the Filipino teachers are bringing, they can make closer to $65,000. It’s an incentive to travel thousands of miles and live away from their families for years in remote areas of South Dakota.

But there are challenges to the program. Roberta Bizardie, superintendent of Todd County Schools, said the district uses roughly 20 Filipino teachers out of about 200 instructional staff. The international hires still have language barriers with children and staff depending on their fluency and accent.

The teachers also can’t earn a driver’s license until they’ve been in the United States for six months, and many choose not to get one in order to avoid paying for a car and gas, making commuting in rural districts difficult. And it’s difficult to find housing in rural areas — especially on tribal land — so school districts try to provide workforce housing that’s close to the school buildings.

Deb Boyd, a Todd County School Board member, said she has heard mixed opinions from parents and community members about international teachers. The primary concern is language barriers from accents — especially at the elementary school level — followed by a concern about turnover.

Filipino teachers are limited to five years in the district — unless they stay another way, such as marrying a local resident.

Boyd said the visa hires are a short-term solution and can’t be the end-all-be-all solution because of the turnover.

The challenges are still worth it to address the teacher shortage in Bizardie’s district, she said.

“They’re a very dedicated group of teachers,” she said. “They go above and beyond and are eager to learn more and learn about our people, the Lakota people and our traditions, and share theirs.”

State program offers path to train established teaching aids

Teacher work visas are meant to plug holes while working on longer term solutions, superintendents say, such as training teaching aides already in classrooms to become accredited teachers.

The Oglala Lakota County Schools offered a “grow your own” program for decades, from the ’80s to the late 2000s.

“It was a way to get local people, who you know will be here their whole lives, involved and become needed teachers,” Kaltenbach said.

The program produced several teachers who have remained in the district for decades, Kaltenbach said. While successful, the program ran out of funding.

The district picked the program back up earlier this year, just months before the state Department of Education announced it would begin its own paraprofessional training program. While the state will focus on teaching aides becoming teachers, the Oglala Lakota program will also offer pathways for teachers interested in earning their special education certification, which is a high need across the state.

In the state program, selected participants will take virtual classes in the evenings at discounted rates through Northern State University or Dakota State University over two years while they work as aides during the work day. 

“This won’t entirely solve the shortages school districts are experiencing now,” said Secretary of Education Joseph Graves in a news release announcing the program, “but if we can knock that number down by a third, that is definitely significant.” 

The program will train 90 teacher aides from more than 50 school districts to become fully certified teachers.

Bizardie said 10 of Todd County’s paraprofessionals applied for the state program — three of them were accepted into the program. She believes the program will be especially helpful for rural and tribal communities, explaining how some of her open teaching positions are in small communities miles away from more populated areas of the reservation.

“If you’re not from the reservation, that’s not something you’d find attractive,” Bizardie said. “But if a paraprofessional went to this small school, lived here her whole life and is committed and invested in that community, you’ll have that teacher forever.”

Aside from the training program, the state department has also made other changes to address teacher needs, such as paying student teachers in the classroom. Student teachers weren’t previously paid.

The state also offers scholarships for college students studying to fill critical teaching needs, such as special education, music, math and science, language arts, and English as a second language.

The Critical Teaching Needs Scholarship Board awarded over $10,000 to 13 applicants at its board meeting this month as an incentive for students to stay and work as a critical need teacher for five years after graduation, surpassing $1 million in funding since the program was created in 2014.

Investing in the next generation of teachers

Over 60% of teachers work within 15 miles of the high school they graduated from, according to a Stanford University study.

To Travis Lape, that means the state and school districts should invest in their current students rather than trying to entice out-of-staters or international workers as a solution.

So Lape, who is the innovation programs director at Harrisburg School District, started a South Dakota Educators Rising chapter in 2016. The organization is similar to other high school career clubs, such as FFA (Future Farmers of America) or HOSA (Health Occupations Students of America), but it focuses on recruiting high schoolers to explore education professions.

The organization hosts learning expos to introduce students to South Dakota universities; state conferences featuring competitions in lesson planning and delivery, public speaking, job interview skills and ethical dilemmas; and a signing day — when student members commit to the university of their choice with photos and a celebration, similar to athletics signing days.

Lape hopes to track the number of students who participate in signing days and then finish their teaching degrees and work in South Dakota.

The state chapter has grown to 35 local chapters and over 275 student members.

“If we’re going to attack the teacher shortage, we need to look at our kids and invest in them so they feel valued and have a place,” Lape said.

Additionally, Educators Rising spearheaded an initiative to allow high school students throughout the state to study and work toward a Child Development Associate credential before they graduate. That means those students will be able to enter the workforce with a credential and nearly 500 hours of supervised early childhood education work under their belts.

The initiative will not only expose students to teaching in classroom settings, but could also be a step to help address the child care shortage across the state as well, Lape said.

“We can pour into all these programs for learning,” Lape said, “but this shortage is going to continue to be a vicious cycle if we only work to fix the situation right now instead of investing in our kids and teachers differently and investing in the long term of how to grow teachers differently.”