Report: Charlottesville struggling to hire and retain teachers

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - Charlottesville City Schools is struggling to hire and retain teachers, this according to a recent report from Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC).

“We’ve been operating in Virginia at a kind of an annual deficit of teachers where you have more teachers leaving than teachers coming through these pathways,” JLARC Associate Director Justin Brown said. “We looked into some of the things that were maybe barriers for people entering kind of on the front end of the pipeline and made some suggestions to kind of remove some of those barriers.”

Brown is referring to Virginia’s K-12 teacher pipeline, which consists of all the statewide programs and processes that recruit and retain teachers.

According to the report, the state average for teacher vacancy is 4.8%. In Charlottesville, it is 7.7%.

“One of the things you see in the data, and then when you talk to teachers and people in divisions, is that schools with particularly high proportions of disadvantaged students, they tend to have a harder time recruiting and retaining teachers,” Brown said.

Brown says this trend is consistent in other Virginia cities, like Richmond and Norfolk, and it could stay this way if changes aren’t made.

“Until the root cause of a lot of these problems are addressed - and that’s the things related to classroom conditions and support outside of the classroom, teacher pay - until that’s fixed, the state broadly and divisions specifically that are struggling, are going to have a hard time,” Brown.

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