NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. — The national teacher shortage is a situation the superintendent of Niagara Falls Schools, Mark Laurrie, knows all too well.
"It is a very competitive market," Laurie says. "I can recall ten years ago, being here, 80 to 90 candidates for an elementary job. Now, we are down to a dozen, maybe less."
To combat the shortage, Laurrie told 7 News that his staff started preparing last spring to fill around 40 open teacher positions in Niagara Falls for the upcoming school year.
"We are down to fewer than a half-dozen openings at this time," Laurrie says. "Those are in the hard-to-fill, secondary areas of science and special education."
Dr. Wendy Patterson, Dean of the School of Education at Buffalo State College, is working to remedy the shortage as she oversees roughly 1,200 education majors and their placements in 25 local schools.
"As fast as we can get them into the classroom we are doing that," said Patterson. "We are having our students hired while they are student teaching because there are so few candidates."
Patterson believes this shortage is directly related to the pandemic, as many teachers chose to retire earlier than expected.
"Burnout is a real thing all the time anyway. But, that with the additional work that teachers had to do in a two-dimensional environment during COVID, I think really sped up the process," said Patterson.
Laurrie says teachers in Niagara Falls have a starting pay of between $45,000 to $52,000, a salary that quickly increases with added degrees and years of service.
Dr. Patterson hopes that competitive salaries and the desire to give back brings more people back to the classroom.
