Teachers like Darling are prized by school district recruiters. In the Anchorage School District, where 20 percent of the students speak 85 different languages, it can be tough to find well-qualified teachers who may be monolingual but are skilled at teaching core academic subjects like mathematics, science, social studies, and language arts to language-minority students. It’s an unfortunate irony that poorer schools with the greatest need are likely to have the least-skilled teachers. These schools are experiencing the greatest influx of students who do not speak English as a first language. People new to this country (as well as other language minorities) who are not affluent often first settle in lower-income neighborhoods where housing is more affordable. Of all the middle schools in Anchorage, Clark has the highest percentage of bilingual students, about 25 percent.
While Darling is the sort of teacher administrators are eager to have in lower socioeconomic schools like Clark, recruiting such experienced staff has gotten especially difficult. Shortly after Darling was hired, the district began limiting starting salaries by capping the number of years of experience teachers could be credited. While Darling received full credit, teachers moving into the district today are credited a maximum of three years. That can mean taking a pay cut of thousands of dollars.
“I’m very lucky,” says Darling. “It’s a foolish policy. They don’t realize how much richness they’re losing in teaching experience.”
The practice has helped to diminish what not so long ago was a deep pool of experienced applicants, recruiters say. When Darling first started looking for a teaching position in Anchorage, there was a surplus of teachers. In fact, she was told she’d probably have to substitute for several years before finding a permanent job.
“Now, they can’t even find enough substitutes,” she says.
While there is a need for content teachers skilled in teaching language-minority students, bilingual and English-as-a-second-language specialists are also sorely needed. Districtwide, more than 4,500 students are receiving bilingual education services, about 9 percent of the student population, says Maxine Hill, bilingual education supervisor. Many of these are Alaska Native students who speak Yup’ik, Inupiaq, Koyukon, Tlingit, and other native languages. But the fastest growing segment of language-minority students consists of youths who have moved to Alaska from distant islands or other countries: Hawaii, the Pacific Islands, the Philippines, Mexico, Vietnam, Korea, Thailand, Russia. Last year, 120 new Hmong students were enrolled. This year, about 140 new Hispanic students moved to the district. The number of new Russian and Albanian students is also increasing.
Language-minority students, in fact, are the fastest-growing group in schools throughout the Northwest. Their numbers have more than doubled in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington this decade. Increasingly, language-minority students and their families are living in places that have not previously served large numbers of English-language learners. Ac cording to the U.S. Department of Education, between 1990 and 1997, the Northwest and Southeast states received the greatest increases of limited-English-proficient students. About that same time period, the Anchorage School District added almost 10,000 new students to its roster; three-quarters of these young people were from an ethnic minority group, district records show. Today, more than a third of all students in the district are minority students.
In addition to second-language specialists, other experts are also in great demand. Special education teachers, speech pathologists, occupational and physical therapists, school psychologists, librarians, and other professionals are needed. School districts are avidly seeking these specialists to fill a need intensified by new immigration, disabilities legislation, information technology, and a growing recognition of the individual learning needs of students.
After years of dipping easily into the scores of resumes sent by teachers eager to work in the state’s most urban district, events converged to create a teacher shortage in Anchorage. In 1998, the district offered a state-mandated retirement incentive, persuading many higher-salaried teachers to take a $10,000 bonus for retiring from the district. Three hundred seasoned teachers took the offer. Several other events amplified the need. Under a state initiative, the district reduced class sizes in elementary grades and in core courses in ninth and 10th grades. This, coupled with the construction of several new schools, spread the teaching corps even thinner. Ad ditionally, until this fall when anticipated enrollment dropped by about 1,000 students, enrollment in the district had been steadily increasing, growing by almost 18 percent over 10 years, according to district records.
After hiring between 800 and 1,000 new teachers over a recent three-year period, the district is feeling the pinch, says Teresa Johnson, Director of Training and Professional Development and recent past director of personnel. There’s now a dearth of available teachers in such areas as advanced math and science, as well as specialists. For example, there were 60 openings for special-education teachers at the beginning of this school year; nearly half of those positions were still vacant well into October. There’s been a pressing need for special-education teachers for several years, says Robyn Rehmann, Executive Director of Special Education. Because Anchorage is by far the largest city in a far-flung state, it receives a large number of special-needs students, says Reh mann. Parents of children with special needs often choose to live in Anchorage precisely because it offers ample social and medical services.
Now is the time to be more creative, says Russ Ament, Personnel Director for the district. Instead of recruiting only on the West Coast where competition for teachers is stiff, partly because of California’s class-size reduction initiative, recruiters decided to go farther afield. It seemed to make sense to recruit in same-weather states, places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Massachusetts, and New York, where people aren’t fazed by months of snow and ice. Also, hiring recent college graduates would circumvent the problem of the three-year limit on credit for experience. District staff set up booths at university job fairs, reaching out to new graduates who might be interested in an Alaska lifestyle.
This is an important consideration. It’s not uncommon for someone to accept a teaching position in Alaska, only to find the winters not to their liking and leave after the first year. Of four new teachers hired last year from one university, two declined at the last moment, and another left Alaska as soon as school ended in the spring. Targeting states with similar weather has resulted in some successes, says Ament.
"To me, we have one of the greatest national treasures and that’s the state of Alaska. It’s not for everybody, but it has a small population so you can still make a difference. And you’re one mountaintop from unspoiled wilderness," he says.
