Login | April 24, 2024
House Bill 554 seeks to alleviate the state's teacher shortage
KEITH ARNOLD
Special to the Legal News
Published: May 20, 2022
Lawmakers in the Ohio House of Representatives were scheduled to learn more about a bi-partisan plan to fill teaching vacancies in classrooms throughout the state.
The state’s teacher shortage was evident as early 2020, according to the joint sponsor of a bill that calls on the state Board of Education to issue two-year temporary educator licenses to teachers who were in good standing at the time they left the classroom.
Rep. Mary Lightbody of Westerville cited the Fordham Institute, which identified a 13,000-teacher deficit from the number of teachers recorded at 112, 834 in 2009.
The Democrat noted that the report did not include data from the two most recent academic years in which schools were heavily affected by government and local school board responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We must provide additional opportunities for educators to join and re-enter the field in order to reverse this trend,” she told fellow House members who serve on the Primary and Secondary Education Committee.
Lawmakers expect the state teacher rolls reflect U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data that show a net loss of around 600,000 public school educators nationally since January 2020.
Filed as House Bill 554, the legislation would simplify the process for former licensed teachers, in good standing, to return to the classroom after working in other professions, Lightbody said.
Currently, Ohio Administrative Code 3301-24-08 requires teachers whose licenses has lapsed fewer than five years to complete nine semester hours of coursework relevant to classroom teaching or in the study area in which the license is to be renewed before a license may be reinstated.
Lightbody noted that educators with licenses that have lapsed for five years or more could re-instate their license upon completion of 12 semester hours of such coursework.
She said the work that former teachers are doing in their current professions may provide significant contributions to the classroom.
“Yet in Ohio they must go back to school after a lifetime of relevant workplace experience to dust off their credentials before they can return to teaching,” she said. “This policy deprives our students of the opportunity to learn from teachers who stepped away from teaching and gained valuable expertise from outside the classroom which they could productively share. These former educators are given no credit for their non-teaching experience and are essentially told to start over, despite having held a valid teacher’s license.”
A provision of the bill requires the state board to issue professional educator licenses to those temporary license holders who complete specified continuing education coursework.
These professional educator licenses and any endorsements are valid for teaching in the same subject areas and grades for which individual’s expired certificate or license was issued, analysis by the non-partisan Ohio Legislative Service Commission provided.
“It is our belief that smoothing out the initial steps for licensure will attract some back to education as a profession during an anticipated time of critical need,” said the bill’s other joint sponsor, Rep. Adam Bird, R-Cincinnati. “House Bill 554 could help facilitate the return of a retiree who allowed their license to lapse but would like to return to the classroom, an English teacher who left the profession for a journalism career, a career tech welding teacher who left for a construction job, a math teacher who left to sell insurance, or any countless number of others in a similar scenario.”
Lightbody said a recent survey from the National Education Association found that more than half of members surveyed are currently considering leaving teaching sooner than they had originally planned.
“It would be prudent to enact a policy which both makes it easier for these teachers to return to the classroom after time away and to provide opportunities to bring qualified teachers back into the field of education,” she concluded.
Nineteen fellow House members have signed on as co-sponsors of the bill, which awaits further consideration by the committee.
Copyright © 2022 The Daily Reporter - All Rights Reserved