California rural schools facing teacher shortages

Hailey Branson-Potts reports in the Los Angeles Times today from Modoc County, California, population 8,700, under the headline, "‘No one is coming to our rescue’: Inside rural California’s alarming teacher shortage."  Some excerpts follow: 

In small, rural districts like Modoc Joint Unified in Alturas, a cattle ranching town of 2,700, being short even a few teachers can send a school spiraling.

At Alturas Elementary School, there are six vacancies — a quarter of the teaching staff.

It has become so difficult to hire and retain educators that administrators have attended hiring fairs not just across California, but also in Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon.

They tried going to North Dakota this year, figuring they could attract small-town folks who might prefer the slightly warmer Northern California winters. They made it all the way to Denver but had to turn back — it had snowed too hard, and their connecting flight was canceled.

All of the out-of-state travel has yielded zero qualified applicants.

The teacher shortage is so dire that administrators say they have no choice but to violate a new state law that will require public school districts to soon offer free TK — an additional year of instruction that precedes kindergarten — to all 4-year-olds.

The district, which had a single TK teacher, is scrapping the grade level altogether.

To recruit teachers, school officials try to sell the perks of rural life: The slower pace. The deer that walk right along Main Street. The postcard-pretty sunrises over the Warner Mountains. Low crime and so little traffic that there is only one stoplight in the whole county.

But they don’t sugarcoat the isolation. When they interview job candidates, they note: Alturas is 100 miles from the nearest Walmart, across the state line in Klamath Falls, Ore.

Branson-Potts then links what's happening to political context:   

People in California’s rural north feel as if this famously liberal state is leaving them behind — a feeling of alienation that has long fueled the region’s conservative politics.

The population is dwindling. Wildfires are getting worse. Law enforcement agencies are woefully understaffed. Hospitals are few and far between.

The state’s move to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035 is, to many residents, laughable in a vast region with few electric vehicle chargers, where people drive farther and, often, over mountain passes. Like universal TK, it feels like an edict from lawmakers who don’t understand the challenges of rural life.

Don't miss the rest of this well-told story.