The Illinois State Board of Education is launching a $6 million recruitment campaign across the state aimed at addressing the ongoing teacher shortage.
The program, called “The Answer Is Teaching,” will use targeted advertising, digital platforms and partnerships with educational institutions and community groups to recruit potential teachers across Illinois.
The campaign’s messaging is centered around the rewards of being a teacher, including testimonials from current teachers also featured on a promotional website. The website includes a form for interested candidates to fill out to begin the process of becoming a teacher.
“We offer teachers competitive pay and benefits, a strong community, and the freedom to develop their curriculum,” State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders said in a Friday news release. “Our goal with this recruitment campaign is both to fill essential teaching positions and also to celebrate the profound impact teachers have on students’ lives.”
The initiative is targeted at filling vacancies in areas like bilingual education, special education and teaching in rural and urban communities. Its advertisements will run in both English and Spanish.
The campaign aims to be a “bicultural and bilingual teacher pipeline” to recruit a diverse group of potential educators, Gov. JB Pritzker said in the statement.
According to a report by ISBE — in partnership with the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative, part of the University of Illinois system, along with the Regional Offices of Education and Intermediate Service Centers, ROE Lead Hubs and Goshen Consulting — 4,096 teaching positions went unfilled in Illinois last school year. The majority of these vacancies were solved through hiring substitutes and retired educators, combining classes and increasing class sizes.
As of Friday, Chicago Public Schools alone has 1,135 open teaching positions on its online job board, with the vast majority of the openings on the South and West sides.
In a statement Friday, CPS said: “We hope the Illinois State Board of Education campaign … leads more candidates toward careers in education and CPS opportunities like Teach Chicago Tomorrow and our Teacher Residency program leading them into a classroom.”
That state has ongoing efforts to reduce the effects of the nationwide teacher shortage in Illinois. In 2022, Pritzker signed a number of measures into law meant to mitigate the effects of the shortage, such as lowering the minimum age to become a paraprofessional for pre-K through eighth grade to 18 and allowing college students in education programs to apply to be substitute teachers. Last year, the governor proposed a Teacher Pipeline Grant Program aimed at giving additional resources to schools struggling with the most needs and vacancies.
The concerns go beyond teaching positions. Earlier this year, support teaching staff members decried the cuts of hundreds of paraprofessional employees in CPS, though the district said it would be adding 600 paraprofessional staffers for the coming year.
The state’s marketing campaign is funded using federal pandemic money and will run through January 2025, the deadline to spend the federal relief funds.
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