As a student at Lahainaluna High School, Jonah Basurto never had enough teachers to cover all his classes. Teachers would leave partway through the year, requiring substitutes or counselors to take their place, and when the school was short-staffed, students would be sent to the cafeteria.

Sometimes, over 100 students would gather in the room to complete their assignments or, more often, play games and watch movies on their phones and computers, Basurto said.

“It was just a hangout spot, every day,” said Basurto, who attended Lahainaluna until last spring.

Hawaii’s high cost of living and isolated location have made recruiting and retaining qualified teachers a long-term challenge for the state. The Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the problem when thousands of Hawaii teachers left the classroom, citing concerns about health and the challenges of providing online instruction.

But Hawaii schools may be seeing some relief for the first time in years. When students returned to classes last week, the Hawaii Department of Education had just 166 unfilled teaching positions. In comparison, DOE recorded over 1,000 vacancies in August 2022.

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Some principals are hopeful that the teacher workforce is beginning to stabilize and grow, reducing the scramble for new hires at the start of every year. A new contract from the teacher’s union is providing veterans with greater pay incentives to stay in the classroom, and the state has also ramped up its employment of educators from the Philippines and other countries.

At the same time, the state is reducing its reliance on emergency hires, who have a college degree but have not completed the coursework or teaching experience needed for a state license. DOE currently employs 342 emergency hires, compared to over 580 last year.

Communications director Nanea Ching said the department is working to help emergency hires become licensed teachers by connecting them with education courses and preparation programs at local colleges. Emergency hires in the DOE have up to three years to earn their teaching licenses.

Keoni Wilhelm, principal at Baldwin High School on Maui, said he’s seeing signs of progress with the teacher shortage. Over the past few years, he added, he’s consistently needed to find substitutes or emergency hires to staff the school, and administrators would sometimes combine classes and teach multiple courses at a time when there were no teachers available.

With recent changes to Baldwin’s class schedule and new recruitment tactics, Wilhelm said he’s finally starting the school year fully staffed without any emergency hires.

“I am cautiously optimistic,” Wilhelm said.

Multiple Points Of Improvement

There’s no single factor explaining the recent decline in teacher vacancies. The number of new hires — just over 1,230 — is comparable to past school years, and the total number of DOE teachers has remained at roughly 13,000 since 2019.

But some principals say teacher retention seems to be improving, requiring them to search for fewer educators each year. At the height of the pandemic, nearly 1,200 teachers were leaving the department annually.

Some teachers were worried about their health as they returned to in-person instruction, while others struggled to support students who didn’t know how to socialize or behave in the classroom after online learning, said Derek Minakami, a principal at Kaneohe Elementary.

Now, Minakami added, teachers seem happier and have more motivation to stay in schools for longer. Under HSTA’s new contract, veteran teachers can increase their pay to over $100,000 beginning next year by taking professional development classes and moving up DOE’s salary scale.

Many teachers who are considering retirement will likely stay in the DOE for a few more years to qualify for the pay raise, said Osa Tui Jr., president of the Hawaii State Teachers Association.

“If you can focus on increasing the pay, you can increase the quality of people coming into the job,” he said.

Other schools have found success by searching for educators internationally. DOE hired 122 new teachers from outside the United States this year, with many employees coming from the Philippines. While most new hires don’t arrive with a state teacher’s license, they come to Hawaii with classroom experience from the Philippines and can stay in the state for up to five years.

The department welcomed roughly 80 teachers from the Philippines at the start of the last school year.

Baldwin High School currently has seven educators from the Philippines who have earned their teaching licenses, Wilhelm said. The staff members are committed to serving Hawaii students and have quickly embraced the school’s culture, he added.

“They’re fabulous,” Wilhelm said. “They love kids.”

Long-Term Solutions Remain Elusive

But Hawaii is still searching for sustainable ways to grow the pool of qualified teachers. Past initiatives like introducing teacher bonuses have seen limited success.

In 2020, DOE introduced annual bonuses to incentivize licensed teachers to work in special education and Hawaiian immersion classrooms, as well as hard-to-staff areas like Waianae and Nanakuli.

But while the $10,000 bonus for special education teachers has motivated existing educators to move into special education positions, it hasn’t had a significant impact on retention, said Roddy Theobald, deputy director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. It’s too early to tell if salary raises are encouraging more people to enter teaching, he added, but the recent decline in special education vacancies is largely due to staff shifting positions within the DOE.

Even still, the bonuses have helped to target a critical area of the teacher shortage, said Dale Fryxell, dean of Chaminade University’s School of Education and Behavioral Sciences. It can be intimidating for new teachers to begin their careers in special education classrooms, he added, and veteran teachers often have the training and experience needed to make a successful transition to leading special education classes.

Hawaii students are interested in becoming teachers, as long as they have a clear pathway to earning a license, Fryxell added. Over 300 students recently applied for Chaminade scholarships covering the full cost of a bachelor’s degree in education, he said, and he’s hopeful that Hawaii’s new apprenticeship program will significantly reduce the costs of earning a teacher’s license.

“If there’s money available, there’s people who are interested,” Fryxell said.

Tui said the state needs to find more permanent solutions to keep experienced teachers in classrooms. He added that he expects a wave of veteran teachers to retire in the next few years, putting another strain on staffing in Hawaii schools.

“We’re on the precipice of a big drop-off,” Tui said.

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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.