VACANCY: Inquire within (or online).
As of Monday, there were still 39 job openings for Monongalia County Schools, which Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr., said he hopes to have filled soon.
While many of the listings are of the extracurricular variety – middle school volleyball coaches, and the like – the overall vacancies in many ways are still reflective of a field still feeling the effects of the pandemic, he said.
“COVID was tough on school systems nationwide,” the superintendent said.
“I know here in Mon, we lost some of our people who decided to go into online teaching,” he said. “You can’t attribute that directly to the pandemic. Maybe they discovered a different calling.”
In 2022, with COVID still entrenched in the classroom and community, America’s schools were 300,000 teachers short, according to numbers culled by the National Education Association.
The contagion, though, couldn’t cop to all of the deficit. The downtrend has been there for years, Campbell said.
“It used to be that if you had an opening for a first grade teacher, you might have 50 or 60 applicants for that one job,” said Campbell, whose career in education has taken him from Virginia to Alaska and China.
“Now you’re lucky if you get 10,” he said.
And classroom needs have always been academic boom-or-bust, he said, with English teachers in demand one decade and science teachers, the other.
“Of the student teachers in our district this year,” Campbell said, “we don’t have one majoring in special education.”
With Mon’s school district boasting higher paychecks and more amenities than most of its West Virginia neighbors – the excessive levy for education, which brings an additional $30 million to school coffers almost always goes through on the ballot – there’s still the money-malaise of the border county, as it were.
Districts over the border in Pennsylvania and Maryland, he said, simply pay better than here.
The state Department of Education, in the meantime, is hoping to keep teachers on this side of the Mason-Dixon line with “TeachWV,” a homegrown initiative for budding educators that offers tuition breaks and other incentives.
