WABASH VALLEY, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV)– School may be out for the summer, but for Northeast School Corporation Superintendent Mark Baker, this can be the busiest time of the year.
After having a full staff about a week ago, circumstances have changed– and now he’s looking to fill about a half-dozen openings before classes begin.
“At one time, we were totally staffed, about a week ago,” he said. “This time of year, you hate to open your email or answer your phone because it seems like someone else is leaving to go someplace else.”
He is far from the only one dealing with staffing issues– the Indiana Department of Education’s Job Bank currently lists over 3,000 openings ahead of the 2023-24 school year.
In Vigo County, the school board discussed their current openings– which sit at about two dozen– during their school board meeting on Monday. Superintendent Chris Himsel said he believes corporations can work with universities to get more people into the education workforce.
“It’s having the relationships with the universities, it’s getting into the classes, it’s meeting people while they are going through their undergraduate program to try to establish those relationships so that they interested in working for our school corporation,” Himsel said.
Baker said NESC has had conversations on how they can get more students interested started at a younger age.
“An exciting thing we had for us was that this summer we hired two North Central Graduates, they left North Central, went up the road to Indiana State, and then we were able to hire them back,” he said. “I think that is one of the things we need to do more of, kind of homegrown, so I think we can develop some programs to keep the kids interested.”
Himsel said the corporation will be ready to go come the first day of classes– but the top concern is always finding quality candidates.
“We want to make sure that we interview them and they are high quality candidates, and we’re not just hiring someone for the sake of hiring someone,” he said. “We’re hiring someone who we trust to be entrusted with a parent’s child, and that’s a very important thing that we try to do, and it would be better for us to be short-staffed, with a high quality sub that we are aware of and familiar with, than it would be to hire someone who we’re not confident is going to be the kind of person we would entrust our child with.”
