On Oct. 31, the Maryland State Board of Education issued a press release declaring teacher shortages in 20 subject areas across the educational spectrum. The state, as a whole, needs to fill many vacant or understaffed areas including everything from special education to high school math and science.

"While we have been able to fill teaching positions in Calvert County, it is becoming more challenging to hire highly qualified teachers in certain areas such as higher level sciences, special education and speech pathology," said Calvert County Public Schools Superintendent Jack Smith.

“In St. Mary’s we have worked extremely hard to make sure that we hire highly qualified teachers. One difficulty that we face as a state is that Maryland does not produce enough graduates in the teaching area to fill all of the vacancies Maryland counties have, said Dr. Edward Weiland, director of human resources for St. Mary’s County Public Schools.

“Most counties in Maryland, as well as our own, traditionally have a difficult time filling all of our special education openings. For the past several years our goal has been to be fully staffed when school opens and we have been able to reach that target most of the time with very few exceptions,” continued Weiland.

According to the MSDE press release, certain subject areas have routinely suffered from shortages for quite some time. Subjects such as chemistry, physics and English for speakers of other languages, historically lack qualified teachers. These shortages are evident in all 24 school systems. In addition to the subjects, there is a noticeable lack of male and minority teachers.

“Special education, upper level math, physics—these positions have been difficult to fill since we began tracking this nearly 25 years ago,” noted Dr. Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland State Superintendent of Schools.  “But our school systems are doing a much better job of recruiting qualified teachers, and such innovations as our first statewide teacher job fair held last year have paid big dividends.”

MSDE declared a shortage of principals, library/media specialists and speech/language pathologists for schools across the state. In 2007, 7,249 teachers were hired in Maryland and only 1,234 came from Maryland higher education programs.

The report revealed that the assessment is that there is no sign that shortages will cease in the short-term. This same report noted that there are only three physics teacher education candidates and that there are no computer science or technology education candidates who are graduating in the coming spring.

The lack of qualified Maryland teaching candidates means that schools districts across the state will have to recruit teachers from outside the area, thus expending money and human resources that should be put to work in the local school systems.