“We have 241 students currently registered for teacher education, which is about 50 percent of our enrollment 10 years ago,” Taylor Raney, director of teacher education at the University of Idaho, said.
Moscow Superintendent Greg Bailey said it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit teachers in the area. And while he called the lack of teachers a national crisis, he said Idaho might face some problems that are specific to the state.
“It’s probably a larger concern in the state of Idaho due to the lack of support that is provided to the teachers,” Bailey said.
With the University of Idaho in Moscow’s backyard, Bailey said the city probably has better hiring opportunities than other areas. But the number of students going into teaching careers at the university has lately been in decline.
Raney said numbers may have bottomed out in the last year, but admissions at the UI’s College of Education have been in decline for the past decade. And those numbers, he said, are representative of a national trend that indicates a shortage of teachers across the country.
Raney said students are typically admitted to teacher education in their sophomore and junior years. According to internal reports from the UI College of Education, the number of students admitted to teacher education decreased from 220 in 2013, to 137 in 2015. That number stayed at 137 in 2016.
Besides national trends, Raney attributes the statistics to a number of Idaho-based issues including state funding of education, building renovations at UI, and the general rurality of the state.
Via Daily News