JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Over the past week, News4JAX has been hearing from dozens of teachers and others about what they think is contributing to an ongoing teacher shortage in the state.
The Florida Department of Education said as of fall 2023 there were about 4,700 total teacher vacancies.
RELATED: Crisis in the classroom: The overwhelming response when we asked about the teacher shortage
Gov. Ron DeSantis was at a Jacksonville school on Monday for a bill signing event and News4JAX tried to ask him questions about the shortage, but he did not take questions from the media.
News4JAX asked viewers the same question last week and we got over 400 responses which doesn’t include hundreds more comments on social media.
We looked for common themes, and more than half the responses mentioned the word “pay” at least once.
There were also 224 mentions of things that are lacking. Some mentioned a lack of support from state and local governments, respect from parents/students/administrators, lack of support or training, and a lack of accountability for student behavior.
Over the weekend News4JAX got emails from two people wanting to talk about teachers trying to get certified to teach in the state. They said this could be an easy help with the shortage.
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The process is called reciprocity. It’s when teacher certifications can be recognized in other states.
In addressing teacher shortages, hundreds blame pay, lack of support, or politics, but not many note troubles with coming to Florida to teach.
William Hall had this problem in 2021.
“We’ve always wanted to come to Florida for a lot of different reasons, not to mention the weather. And I had seen various articles indicating that Florida offered reciprocity to teachers in other states. So I was pretty excited about that,” Hall said.
Hall taught for three years in Illinois. He said he had all his certifications and thought he’d be good to go. But he was denied because the state said he needed to take classes he already passed in Illinois.
“What made me reach out to you is I still wanted to teach here in Florida,” Hall said. “I saw that, a couple of things, one, that there’s a teacher crisis and here I am ready and able to go and I think I possess some life experience that I could convey in the classroom.”
He also saw where the state department of education said one of Gov. DeSantis’s initiatives in addressing teacher shortages is offering reciprocity for educators with current valid out-of-state certificates or National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certificates so they can teach in Florida.
So, Hall called the FDOE on Friday to maybe try to teach again.
“So, in short, the department denies reciprocity to many of our state educators,” he said.
News4JAX submitted a public records request with DOE asking for the number of people in the last three years who applied for reciprocity, the number approved, and the number denied.
The criteria for approval are laid out on their website and it even includes common errors.
Hall said he knows of other teachers coming from out of state who were denied and some who were approved to teach until they got their certifications, but that wasn’t offered to him.
“Those are teachers that could certainly at least start teaching and maybe they needed one or two classes, or if the classes are even close, and they have experience, it seems to me that you would want to put them in the classroom,” Hall said.
He said it seems like an impediment and doesn’t help with the current shortage in the state.
What Hall shared is just one person’s experience and there’s a chance it could be different from state to state, but we compared Florida and Georgia and the process seems fairly similar. Reciprocity doesn’t mean certified teachers from out of state will automatically qualify but there is a process to follow.