Teacher retention in Missouri has increased since the coronavirus pandemic, according to new data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
During the 2023-2024 school year, 88.7% of all teachers remained in the profession, but schools struggled to retain first-year teachers. State officials said the data signals a turning point in a teacher shortage Missouri has struggled to address in recent years.
Teacher retention slipped to 88.2% during the 2022-2023 school year from 91.1% in the 2018-2019 school year, the last complete school year before the pandemic.
There are also more people enrolled in teacher preparation programs in 2023-2024, the most recent data available, than before the pandemic. That has led to a stronger pipeline of candidates, state education officials said.
Paul Katnik, assistant commissioner of educator quality, said during a monthly meeting with the Missouri State Board of Education on Tuesday that state-funded programs like Grow Your Own, scholarships for students in teacher training programs and changes to those programs are helping keep teachers in schools.
“Addressing the teacher shortage problem here in Missouri, if you’ll imagine, is an immense task,” Katnik said. “Just like changing the direction of a large ship at sea. It’s slow. It’s deliberate and it happens through incremental changes.”
The state continues to face a critical shortage of teachers, especially in core subject areas like math, science and social studies, and in elementary education.
“Everybody realized this was a crisis and took action,” State School Board President Charles Shields said. “We’ve got more work to do, but clearly you’re starting to see an impact.”
Schools in rural areas of the state are more likely to see turnover of teaching staff and to struggle to employ fully certified teachers.
There are over 72,000 teachers in Missouri and over 870,000 students enrolled in its public schools, according to DESE. The department does not track students enrolled in private or parochial schools.
The state has also added over 1,500 teachers of color since the 2018-2019 school year, the last complete school year before the pandemic. Just over 90% of public school teachers in the state are white despite an increasingly diverse student population. About 6% of teachers are Black.
The department also released a “Teacher Recruitment and Retention Playbook,” which is a set of guidelines for school leaders to help further curb teacher shortages in their districts.
“The release of our own Teacher Recruitment and Retention Playbook provides a vision for the future, shaping how Missouri will address the challenges of the current teacher shortage and ensure a high-quality teacher is available for every student, in every classroom, in every school in our state,” said Commissioner of Education Karla Eslinger in a statement.
The department plans to launch an educator job board where potential candidates can find and apply for teaching jobs across the state later this month.
