Texas Education Agency expands its teacher vacancy task force
AUSTIN, Texas — In efforts to have equal representation of teachers and administrators, the Texas Education Agency announced its expanding its teacher vacancy task force. Before this expansion was announced, the task force mostly consisted of superintendents and administrators and only a few teachers. In order to better understand the challenges Texas schools face, the tea felt it needed to add more educators to gain their insight and recommendations.
The executive director of the association of Texas professional educators Shannon Holmes says he is pleased that the TEA has listened to their concerns regarding the makeup of the vacancy teacher task force.
“You can’t really expect to make progress on an issue like this and not have teachers in the discussion,” said Holmes.
Holmes also expressed he feels it’s important to include the voices of teachers and says the pandemic has exasperated staffing issues in Texas schools. Stress brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is one theory why more teachers are leaving classrooms. The teacher vacancy task force was designed to identify staffing challenges facing Texas public schools and provide solutions to the problems. Attorney and education consultant Catherine Michael believes more should be done beyond expanding the task force.
RELATED: Advocates push back against bills aimed at banning certain books in school libraries
“We know why teachers are unhappy. Their over worked, underpaid and not receiving support in the classroom. A task force is simply looking at what we already know is the issue. We know the problems and we know those problems need to be addressed through legislature. We need to get salaries up for teachers we need to get them support in the classrooms,” said Michael.
Michael thinks those problems have existed for a while and feels some are losing interest because their concerns have fallen upon deaf ears. Holmes thinks the committee doing the right thing by making the expansion.
“You have to have that lived experience about what’s going on in the classroom and causing you to leave as well as we need to find out why more young people aren’t choosing education as a profession. Those are the two issues I think that are most important.”
TEA made the announcement earlier this week that two dozen additional teachers will be added to the task force. As for when they will officially become a part of the committee? That’s still to be determined as this process is still developing.
To keep up with the process, click here.
