Jenna Zemrak, a literacy teacher for kindergarten through fifth grade, sets up her classroom Friday at Albert S. Hall School in Waterville. Waterville schools have only a few staffing positions to fill as the 2023-24 school year launches, but staffing problems are more severe in some districts. Michael G. Seamans/Morning Sentinel

With students heading back to the classroom in the coming days, the school district serving the Skowhegan area is facing a critical staffing shortage that has administrators scrambling to make sure the needs of students are being met.

Superintendent Jon Moody told the Maine School Administrative District 54 board recently the district is well short of the number of educational technicians that it needs.

“We’re looking at 26 open ed tech positions in the district we haven’t been able to fill,” he told the board. “It is definitely worse than I’ve ever seen.”

The district can fill about 14 of those positions with substitute teachers, he said, but it then becomes a matter of prioritizing where ed techs are most needed at the district’s nine schools.

The staffing shortages that MSAD 54 is facing are being seen across Maine and beyond as comparatively low salaries, eroding public opinion and other factors are hurting school districts. The problem is more acute in certain districts — rural districts with traditionally lower pay struggle more with staffing — but educators say the COVID-19 pandemic worsened matters for urban and rural school systems.

“Even before COVID, in Maine and New England, and I believe nationally, there has been a growing crisis of workforce in the education field,” Commissioner Pender Makin of the Maine Department of Education said.

Other districts in central Maine, including Fairfield-based Maine School Administrative District 49 and Waterville Public Schools, say their staffing issues are not as acute as in Skowhegan, but they still have openings to fill.

“Fortunately, we have be able to fill the majority of open positions,” MSAD 49 Superintendent Roberta Hersom said.

The district still needs support staff members, including bus drivers, she said, and it has responded by consolidating some bus runs.

Waterville Superintendent Peter Hallen said last week that while he still needed to hire two teachers and seven ed techs, the district was more fully staffed at the outset of the 2023-24 school year than in the prior three years.

Jenna Zemrak, a literacy teacher for kindergarten through fifth grade, sets up her classroom Friday at Albert S. Hall School in Waterville. Waterville schools have only a few staffing positions to fill as the 2023-24 school year launches, but staffing problems are more severe in some districts. Michael G. Seamans/Morning Sentinel

“I think part of that is the School Board and city’s commitment to teacher and staff contracts that have made us at least competitive with area districts,” Hallen said. “But our administrative team has also been proactive about recruitment and retention efforts and sought innovative ways to provide instruction and other services.”

Makin said such recruitment and retention efforts were hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic, as teachers and other staff members took early retirement or found working in person untenable. Matters worsened over the past five years or so, she said, with public discourse “denigrating” the field of public education.

“People want to select a career where they’ll be respected,” Makin said. “Public opinion is a critical part of that.”

Another factor is that the minimum salary for teachers in Maine is $40,000, lower than teacher salaries in any other New England state and in the bottom half of starting salaries nationally. Maine’s livable wage — the amount one must make to cover basic needs — for a single person is $34,382, according to data from World Population Review.

The average salary for all teachers in Maine is $58,757, while the national average is $66,745, according to the National Education Association in Washington, D.C.

Makin said she is optimistic things will improve in the coming years, adding she is encouraged by certification data the state Department of Education received this summer that showed 1,500 more educators were certified to teach in Maine this year than last year, a 25% increase in applications.

“That’s good news,” she said, “and I’m expecting that to continue.”

Makin also cited an initiative launched earlier this month by the administration of Gov. Janet Mills that is aimed at helping Maine schools recruit, train and retain educators. Under the effort, schools and educational organizations can apply for up to $250,000 in state funding to begin local pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs that help address the workforce shortage.

Moody, the MSAD 54 superintendent, said his administrative team is also brainstorming ways to fill positions. Some on the MSAD 54 board floated the idea of partnering with nearby institutions, such as Kennebec Valley Community College, to hire students training in the education field as part-time educators who could work for pay and school credit.

Moody also said he is in talks with a business that subcontracts ed techs out to schools suffering from a shortage of them.

An ed tech I in MSAD 54 has a pay range of $14.43 to $17.95 an hour, Moody said at the recent board meeting. Administrators are looking to renegotiate the pay and benefits this September, he said. Ed techs provide educational support to teachers and others to address shortcomings in student learning.

The issue is particularly problematic among educators trained to teach students with special needs. There is a shortage of special education teachers at every grade level in Maine, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Administrators said other teaching jobs are slightly easier to fill this year than a year ago.

“At this point, people are preparing to reorganize and start the year without being fully staffed,” Steve Bailey, executive director of the Maine School Management Association, told the Portland Press Herald. “It’s coming down to the wire.”