Strengthening Vermont’s public educator workforce is a priority of the McClure Foundation.
Teaching is the highest-demand job in Vermont that pays at least $30 per hour, with more than 7,400 projected openings over the next decade. It’s also the profession that makes all others possible by preparing young people for their own career and life paths and enabling working parents to work.
Vermont has faced teacher shortages for more than a decade, particularly in rural areas and in high-need fields like math and special education. As veteran educators retire or leave the profession, and as the number of graduates from Vermont’s teacher preparation programs has dropped by half, the shortage has only deepened.
Vermont has 10% fewer teachers than it did before the pandemic, the second-largest decline in the country.
Rural schools have the highest share of teachers working under emergency or provisional licenses, according to the Vermont Agency of Education.
Because teacher quality is one of the strongest predictors of student success, the consequences of this workforce shortage are significant.
Educator workforce development and diversification is a highly intersectional issue, touching everything from credentialing and licensure pathways, to hiring practices and school climate, to geographic pay disparity and the availability of housing for newly hired teachers.
Absent a clear state-led strategic plan to support educator workforce development, we lean on the framework offered by the Diversifying the Educator Workforce report from the New England Secondary School Consortium (NESSC) when determining roles for philanthropy to support this issue. The report names diversification as a central workforce development strategy and recommends five key strategies necessary to build a stronger educator workforce:
Supporting Vermont youth to explore careers in education.
Districts need support to recruit educators, especially diverse educators in rural regions.
The traditional pathways to licensure, including college-based prep programs, are associated with inequitable access and success rates.
Supporting VTSU to stipend the unpaid full-time student teaching semester of students pursuing licensure. Six other states have recently introduced and passed legislation to stipend similar student teaching placements for students at public institutions.
Vermont needs more innovative and supportive pathways to licensure. In the 2023/24 school year, only 151 people received their initial teacher license through a traditional university-based prep program in Vermont. That’s not enough to meet the 7,460 openings projected over the next decade.
Supporting the Vermont Rural Education Collaborative (VREC) to develop and pilot Vermont’s first-ever registered apprenticeship program for K12 teaching, through which thirty residents of the Northeast Kingdom are pursuing teacher licensure while they work in some of the most rural schools in the state. The AOE and VDOL are now supporting this effort.
Collaborating with regional philanthropy efforts to strengthen and diversify the educator workforce.
Joining the Barr Foundation in supporting the Vermont chapter of Great Schools Partnership’s New England-wide “Diversifying the Educator Workforce” Collaborative.
As we learn alongside our current grantee partners, we invite ideas about roles for philanthropy to continue supporting teacher workforce development and diversification in Vermont. Please reach out to Executive Director Carolyn Weir at cweir@vermontcf.org.
“When you invest in the educators, you see some pretty incredible outcomes. ”
Rachel Potts | Work-Based Learning Coordinator, Harwood Union High School