Dallas school leaders are celebrating a swell in teacher applications that allows them to welcome students back to classes with a low number of educator vacancies.
Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said the district has fewer than 140 open positions out of its roughly 10,000 slots. Those that remain unfilled are mostly in hard-to-staff areas, such as special education, math and bilingual classrooms.
District teams are working to ensure “each one of our students has access to a certified teacher on Day One,” Elizalde said Wednesday at the Winspear Opera House. DISD is still recruiting at a teacher job fair this week.
The uptick in teacher applications — more than 8,000 people looked to join the district — comes after a challenging few years for recruitment. Around this time last year, DISD had roughly 220 vacancies.
Fallout from the pandemic, along with a nationwide teacher shortage in key areas, left Texas principals scrambling last summer to fill essential slots.
Many districts, including Dallas, increased their reliance on educators who lacked a Texas teaching certification.
Texas employed more than 380,000 teachers last school year, according to data from the Texas Education Agency.
While hiring numbers are high, the state still faces a retention problem. More than 13% of teachers left in 2022-23, up from around 10% before the COVID-19 pandemic.
A bill aimed at tackling teacher retention died in the final days of the Legislature, after Republicans tied a plan to provide educators with raises to an education savings account proposal that would have funneled public dollars toward private school tuition.
At the Winspear event, Elizalde thanked a packed room of new hires for choosing Dallas at a time when educators are in high demand. They are now a part of making DISD a premier urban school district, she said.
“Each of you are the Statue of Liberty,” she told them. “You take them all; and you teach them all; and you love them all. And that is why you make a difference.”
She reiterated that the idea of “teaching to test” is dead in Dallas ISD. Cutting back on the number of student assessments frees up days of instructional time for teachers, she said. Classrooms will move away from worksheets and fill-in-the-blanks.
“This whole movement is going to allow teachers to truly feel both the science and the art that is teaching,” she said.
Jamile Bahra came to the Winspear excited to start her first official teaching job. She moved to Texas from Lebanon to get her master’s degree from the University of Houston. After graduating, she learned Dallas ISD could help her with a visa, and she felt like she’d found her new home here.
She grew up volunteering at her aunt’s school for students with special needs. Now, she’ll work as a special education teacher.
“I was always the teacher’s assistant, always helping with the kids,” Bahra said. “I cannot believe I get to be the teacher now.”
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
