L.A. District to Start School Year With More Than Enough Teachers

Three weeks before the start of school, the Los Angeles Unified School District has found more than enough people to staff its classrooms, making it one of the few large urban systems in the nation that will start the school year with a full complement of teachers.

This is the second consecutive year that Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school district, has met its recruiting goals. About 2,800 of 7,000 candidates interviewed this summer have been offered teaching positions. Last spring the district announced that it would have 2,500 vacancies.

“We always like to have a few more people than we need on the staff because you can never tell what might happen during the first few weeks of the school year,” district spokesman Bill Rivera said.

Higher Starting Salaries

School Board President Rita Walters attributed the improvements in recruiting to streamlining of the cumbersome application process and to higher starting salaries.

In the past it sometimes took months for an applicant to be hired. Two years ago the process was made more efficient, and this summer it took some applicants just one day to complete the necessary paper work and interviews.

“I credit our recruitment success to the new streamlined procedure,” Walters said. “I also believe that raising the beginning salary to $19,500 has helped to attract new people to our staff.”

In 1983, the year before the raise, the starting salary for teachers was $14,820.

But while the Los Angeles district begins the school year with an ample teaching staff, New York City may be short 2,700 teachers, Chicago needs 800 substitute instructors and Dallas still has a few vacancies after hiring 600 new teachers, officials in those cities said.

A spokesman for San Diego schools said his district does most of its hiring after the fall semester begins. Once school starts in September, officials expect that they will have to find 100 to 200 new elementary teachers, he said.

Problems in Urban Districts

“It is the urban districts, with large minority enrollments and fast-growing limited English-speaking populations that are having the most problems,” said a spokesman for the National Education Assn., the nation’s largest teachers union.

What makes the recruiting effort difficult are low salaries, the rising birthrate and the large influx of immigrants into the public schools, officials say. Adding to the problem is the fact that many teachers will reach retirement age during the next decade.

In Los Angeles, for example, the median age for a teacher is about 52, according to Wayne Johnson, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles, the district’s largest teachers union. A teacher with at least 20 years’ experience has the option of taking early retirement at age 55.

“There are going to be massive retirements in this district in about four or five years,” Johnson said, adding that this could create a severe shortage.

Walters said that although the district has enough staff to start the school year, the recruiting process will not come to an abrupt halt. The district is still accepting applications from people who are bilingual, have credentials to teach handicapped students or who want to teach high school math.

Among the new Los Angeles teaching recruits are 137 teacher trainees, who have bachelor’s degrees in fields other than education. Most will be placed at 55 inner-city schools that the district regards as hard to staff.

Some of the trainees have spent three weeks in orientation classes taught by veteran teachers. The program, according to a district spokesman, is designed to ensure that “nobody walks into a classroom cold.”