Won’t You Stay a Little Longer?

The challenge in rural America of teacher recruitment and retention

Rural administrators expect to wear a lot of hats. Most of us have shoveled our share of snow, served cafeteria food, swept floors, substitute taught and bandaged the elbows and knees of a small army of children. But when our only kindergarten teacher stood before me just days before the school year began in rural Shirland, Ill., on the border with Wisconsin, and regretfully explained why she had to resign, I seriously wondered if I’d be starting the year off in her role.

Having begun my career as a high school teacher, I found the prospect of standing in front of a room of 18 kindergarteners terrifying. How could Mrs. Harris (a pseudonym) do this to me? Even worse, the kindergarten open house was just hours away. How would I tell the parents, who were understandably anxious about sending their babies off to school, that we just lost our only kindergarten teacher?

“Mrs. Harris,” I pleaded, barely able to contain my rising anxiety, “isn’t there something I can do to make you reconsider? I have no idea where I’ll find another kindergarten teacher on such short notice. Why do you want to teach in Rockford anyhow?” With nearly 30,000 students, Rockford Public Schools is the state’s third-largest district. And while it’s only 18 miles away, it is about as different as can be from rural Shirland’s 120 students.

“I hate to leave,” she said consolingly, “but how can I turn down an $18,000 raise and full health insurance for my family? And I’ll never have to worry again about the district closing its doors because of (state-imposed) consolidation or declining enrollment.”

And so I watched helplessly as yet another promising young teacher walked out the schoolhouse door, lured like so many before her to a larger, nearby school district offering higher pay and better benefits.

Shortages and Turnover

School districts nationwide are grappling with a teacher shortage caused, in part, by a sharp decline in enrollment in teacher preparation programs from 2010 to 2014, as reported by the U.S. Department of Education, and by an improved economy offering better paying jobs to college graduates. California, which licenses an average of 15,000 teachers annually, was short 21,500 teachers at the start of the 2014-15 school year. One month from the start of this school year, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., district still had 200 teacher openings.

In rural districts, the teacher shortage has intensified the longstanding challenges of teacher recruitment and retention. Now more than ever, rural administrators find themselves pleading with their teachers, as Jackson Browne crooned on the final track of his album “Running on Empty,” “Oh, won’t you stay/just a little bit longer?/Please, please, please/say you will.”

Teacher turnover is a problem nationwide, but it impacts rural school districts, responsible for educating 20 percent of the nation’s youth, the hardest. Rural schools regularly report teacher turnover rates of 30-50 percent, with the highest teacher turnover found in rural schools with fewer than 300 students. Faced with a shortage of teachers, rural districts often have to consolidate classes, cancel course offerings, assign classes to unqualified teachers or rely on uninspiring online computer courses.

When rural teachers resign, there is little their principals can do except watch as another teacher packs his or her bags for a better-paying position. Few rural districts have penalty clauses for teachers to prevent them from breaking contracts because collective bargaining associations oppose them, teacher recruits are discouraged by them and rural districts can ill afford the legal cost of enforcement.

Influencing Factors

If rural administrators want to persuade their teachers to stay a little bit longer, they need a better understanding of the recruitment and retention factors that influence teachers to accept and remain in positions in rural districts.

In fall 2014, 54 percent of teachers employed in the 24 smallest Illinois school districts participated in a survey to measure the influence of teacher recruitment and retention factors on overall job satisfaction. The survey was based on Australian educator Colin Boylan’s model of four domains for teacher recruitment and retention: classroom factors, schoolwide factors, community factors and family/personal factors.

Teachers are most likely to accept rural assignments for family or personal reasons but remain because of community factors.

Study participants reported that the most influential recruitment factors were “best or only job offer,” “enjoy the rural lifestyle,” “family and or home close by” and “small class size.” But these factors were not what influenced teachers to remain teaching in rural schools. Rural teachers stayed because of their “relationships with students,” “safe environment,” “small class size” and “support from administrator, parents and community.”

Since rural school districts cannot compete with the better pay and benefits offered by suburban and urban districts, the rural community itself must understand it plays a key role in determining whether a teacher remains. Rural communities need to make every effort to include their teachers in the social fabric of the community, thereby lessening the social and geographic isolation they experience. This can be challenging because the study indicates 83 percent of rural teachers do not live in the communities where they teach.

Rural communities can build connections with their teachers by inviting them to social functions and getting to know them as both friends and neighbors. Rural communities are often busy places with community potlucks, book clubs, softball games, dances and card nights. It takes courage for a young rural teacher, new to a community, to attend these social events for the first time. Whether the teacher ever attends another event is largely determined by how they are received by community members. If teachers are made to feel as if they are living in a fishbowl, their every move analyzed, they will likely never return. It is essential for rural communities to recognize teachers are people, too, and refrain from talking to them only about school.

 Rural teachers value flexible schedules.
In addition to competitive salaries and insurance packages, survey participants indicated “more flexibility with scheduling including flexible personal days” as an effective strategy for increasing rural teacher recruitment and retention. Rural administrators with tight budgets may want to emphasize flexibility as a teacher recruitment and retention strategy. With 83 percent of rural teachers commuting to the communities that employ them, a later start time in inclement weather or an early dismissal to attend a medical appointment may entice some rural teachers to stay a little bit longer.

 Homegrown recruitment initiatives don’t work.
Because homegrown teachers already live in and know the rural communities where they teach, they are thought to bring staying power to their teaching assignments. However, researchers suggest homegrown teachers can negatively affect a school’s culture because other teachers may perceive homegrown staff as receiving preferential treatment. If the homegrown teacher is unsuccessful, the school district’s relations with the community can sour. While hiring homegrown teachers is a gamble for rural administrators, it pays big when the homegrown teacher is successful. The connection is already there with the community, and the homegrown teacher is more likely to remain in the rural district as a result.

Additionally, the study’s findings suggest it is more important for teacher recruits to have a rural background than to be homegrown. Rural administrators should be sure to include interview questions about the backgrounds of teacher candidates because those with a rural background are more likely to remain teaching in rural schools.

 Marketing efforts need improvement.
District marketing efforts were seen by study participants as largely ineffective, in that they were nonexistent or in need of improvement. Rural school districts should strategically focus their recruitment marketing on hard-to-fill roles, such as special education, math, science and reading specialists. Launching a district website might be the first step because half the rural school districts in the Illinois study did not have their own websites.

Because study results indicated rural Illinois teachers were satisfied with the profession at or above the national average, rural administrators should conduct exit interviews whenever possible to identify the factors leading to teacher turnover.

Ties That Bind

When teachers exit as hastily as our kindergarten teacher did, it’s helpful for rural administrators to be able to call upon one of their retired teachers, who often act like guardian angels over the rural schools they once served. As superintendent-principal of a district with 120 students in kindergarten through 8th grade, I let out a sigh of relief knowing I had averted certain disaster when Mrs. Pankratz, one of our retired teachers, agreed to accept the long-term kindergarten assignment. Nervous parents were now reassured about sending their young children to school for the first time, especially as I wasn’t going to be their kindergarten teacher!

I had dodged a bullet. Maybe, just maybe, I’d start the new school year fully staffed. I could remain just the superintendent-principal (as well as the nurse, food service worker and part-time custodian). I was still in a celebratory mood when the special education teacher came into my office and shut the door. The much larger, wealthier high school district nearby had offered her a teaching position.

Thankfully, she declined. It was too close to the start of the school year for her students. Besides, she felt a connection with our staff and our community and didn’t want to leave us hanging. But she did want me to know that the high school had told her they’d call again in the spring and, when they did, she intended to accept the special education assignment.

Knowing how hard it is to find a good special education teacher, this rural administrator had better start looking for another teacher. At least my special education teacher was giving me enough time that I might be able to find a replacement before needing to fall back on my own special education teaching license.

Rural school districts should not have revolving doors. Rural teachers may indeed stay a little bit longer if rural administrators can better understand the factors that influence rural teacher recruitment and retention.