Sharon Cabrera, a Tamuning Elementary School fifth grade teacher, in her classroom on April 30, 2024.
HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — The shortage of teachers on Guam is not unique. At the national level, shortages persist across the United States, but here on the island, the pool of teachers is by far more limited. Guam Department of Education Deputy Superintendent of Curriculum and Instructional Improvement Joseph Sanchez shared with The Guam Daily Post several initiatives to come into compliance with the Adequate Education Act.
Four months into the school year, GDOE has 53 teacher vacancies — 22 in elementary, 30 in secondary and one in Head Start — but, for decades, the department’s teacher needs have outweighed supply.
“Pretty much every state and a lot of districts throughout the country…are having problems recruiting and keeping teachers.… Guam does have a little bit of an advantage because we don’t really have any competition. Like our teachers don’t leave us for private schools or charter schools, but they do sometimes go to (Department of Defense Education Activity), so that is a challenge,” Sanchez said.
“But at the same time, it’s also a disadvantage that we’re an island.… There’s not a lot of districts that are nearby where we can pull teachers from. So, a lot of the teachers that we get have to be homegrown,” he added.
While “homegrown” is not bad, Sanchez said, supply isn’t meeting demand.
“This has been a problem for years. What we’ve done in the last 10 years…is find programs…to encourage people to go into teaching and provide support so that they can get certified,” Sanchez said.
According to the Adequate Education Act, a certified teacher is required for every class. But hiring certified teachers has also been challenging. According to Sanchez, GDOE has roughly 100 teachers that need to be certified.
While the department has 53 teacher vacancies, not all teachers hired will be certified, a practice that has played out in past recruitment efforts.
“They have degrees in their fields, and they want to come in to try teaching. Some of them have stayed with us for a number of years. So, they’re considered limited-term full-time or limited-term part-time teachers,” Sanchez said.
But once on board, GDOE offers an initial teacher certification program.
“We have a program that works towards certifying those teachers,” Sanchez said.
GDOE pays for the Praxis training and the Praxis test. Once passed, the teachers can take certification courses with the department’s partner.
“We have a contract with the University of Guam that we’ve been working with where they can actually take the certification courses while they’re teaching with us. And so far, we’ve been (successful) in certifying 94 teachers in the system. So, we’re really glad that this program has added almost 100 teachers yield to the pool,” he said.
GDOE currently has 20 teachers in the program to become fully certified.
“So that’s about 20 to 25 teachers per year that participate, and it takes them about two years to actually get fully certified,” Sanchez said.
Recruiting teachers is only half the battle for the public school system. Once a teacher is certified, GDOE must work to keep them on board, another issue challenging the department.
“Once they get certified, we have a mentoring program that supports them, a school-based mentor. … We assign some of our veteran teachers to basically support them while they’re at the school site,” Sanchez said.
The proactive approach taken by GDOE has taught the department about the changing trend in today’s worker mentality as it relates to retention.
“We know that teachers, based on the research, tend to leave within three to five years. That’s around the time that they decide whether or not they’re going to stay in education,” said Sanchez.
It used to take up to five years before a teacher would decide to leave the department, he said.
“Especially with the Y generation or the millennials, where they tend to be more transient when it comes to their job selections, right? So, the numbers that we used to use — those three to five years where a teacher would decide to stay in teaching — that’s not the case with this younger generation. A lot of times now, it’s two to three years. And also, that’s why those two, three years, their first part of teaching, is so critical,” Sanchez said.
The mentorship program, which involves the veteran teacher working with the new teacher during and outside of school hours, has been successful, said Sanchez.
“We’ve had about 70 to 80 teachers participate in that program for the last five years. … A little over 400 teachers have been supported through that mentoring,” Sanchez said.
To address the supply issue, Sanchez told the Post that they hope to secure funds from the Consolidated Grant to create an educator’s pathway for high school students interested in a job in the education industry.
“We want to start a (career technical education) program.… It’s not just for teachers, it’s actually for educators in general. So we’re calling it like an educator’s pathway because a lot of our school aides, a lot of our one-to-one aides, a lot of our entry-level positions are actually high school graduates that come out of the system. … We have a lot of school aides that just graduated two or three years ago, right? So, you know, there’s an interest, you know, at that younger level. So we are going to start (an) educator program in the high schools, where the intent is to very similar to the (Guam Community College) CTE programs where we want to offer the courses to help prepare them to go into education,” Sanchez said.
But while that project is in the infancy stage, another effort that will address the supply issue is the decommissioning of schools.
Sanchez acknowledged that decommissioning carries a negative connotation with school closures, but he shared it also brings positive impacts directly to students.
“The consolidation of schools and the maximization of resources really brings down the number of vacant positions and the number of classes that are in existence without certified teachers. … We were able to save … having teaching positions over the last three or four years through maximization. It hasn’t resulted in overcrowding or anything like that because our student numbers continue to go down. So even with the maximization that we’re doing now, in some cases, … ends up with like three or four teaching positions that are no longer needed,” Sanchez said.
By “no longer needed” Sanchez clarified that doesn’t mean teachers are losing their jobs. However, with a system currently built for 30,000 students and only serving 23,000 students, the department must make moves to live within its budget, and that means downsizing.
“With that downsizing in a student population, there should be an associated downsizing in the number of teachers and teacher vacancies. I do want to emphasize that we don’t foresee any certified teachers losing their jobs. Because again, we’ve never really hit 100% of certified teachers, so we are always going to need teachers no matter what,” Sanchez said.
He said the decommissioning and maximization of resources ensures that “students who may not have a certified teacher can actually get one.”
Sanchez added that while funding is limited, teachers remain the highest priority for hiring within GDOE.
