- November 23, 2024
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The Flagler County School District teacher shortage is shrinking.
Flagler Schools is currently looking to fill about seven classroom positions, Superintendent LaShakia Moore said.
“We’re in a much better place than we were in last year,” Moore said.
The district hired seven teachers in late January while one teacher resigned and one was terminated since Jan. 26.
Moore said 17 classrooms in the district currently have some kind of long-term substitute, but many of them are certified teachers. Some are retired and some others are awaiting their certification to be issued from the state of Florida, she said.
The district’s greatest need continues to be paraprofessionals, Moore said.
The district hired two paraprofessionals — one for Rymfire Elementary School, one for Bunnell Elementary School — in the past two weeks, according to the district’s February personnel item list. But a paraprofessional at Belle Terre Elementary resigned effective Jan. 30.
The seven teachers that were hired from Jan. 24 to Jan. 31 include a replacement for Bunnell Elementary School teacher Anthony Hines, who resigned in September amid the investigation into the school’s assemblies for African American students.
The district also hired a speech-language pathologist at Flagler Palm Coast High School, a pre-K ESE teacher at BES, two teachers at Buddy Taylor Middle School (one that’s a new position), a teacher at FPC and a teacher at Matanzas High.
Moore said the district currently has 10 instructional positions that are open. Of those, at least five are classroom positions — a social studies teacher at Indian Trails Middle School, a math teacher at Buddy Taylor, a digital photography teacher at Matansas, a fifth-grade teacher at Rymfire Elementary and a second grade teacher at Old Kings Elementary.
For us to be sitting here with about seven open teaching positions, that's pretty good.”
— LASHAKIA MOORE, Flagler School superintendent
Other openings include a teacher for the visually impaired, a school phychologist, a math and science coach at Buddy Taylor Middle School and an ESE emotional/behavioral disability teacher at Wadsworth Elementary.
The teacher for the visually impaired comes into classrooms to make sure visually-impaired students have access to instruction, Moore said.
“They work with those students individually and work in consultation with the teachers,” Moore said. “That's one of the positions that we would contract out with a contract service in order to fill.”
That opening and the other three are not full-time classroom positions, Moore said.
“Those are positions that are supporting students in different classrooms or supporting the teachers in a different capacity, so for us to be sitting here with about seven open teaching positions, that's pretty good,” she said.
