KELO is about as good at writing headlines as Pat Powers. Today's example:
Survey: 30 Percent Of SD Teaching Positions Open
30%?! Holy turnover! Nationally, the teacher attrition rate is about 16%. 30% turnover would put South Dakota on the news map. But KELO's headline is wrong. The AP report says that 30% of teaching positions posted this year remain open. This information comes from the School Administrators of South Dakota, who offer the following information:
- South Dakota schools advertised 803 teaching positions this spring. Out of about 9,000 teaching positions total, that suggests a turnover rate of 9%. Remarkable: even with our lowest in the nation pay, those figures suggest South Dakota teachers leave their jobs at a lower rate than the rest of the nation. Dedication?
- But wait! SASD gets its info from a voluntary survey of school districts. SASD says 125 of South Dakota's 151 school districts responded... which means we're missing info from about a sixth. Divide our turnover rate by 83% , and we get an adjusted turnover rate more like 11%.
- 258 of those positions were still open on May 28.
SASD also collects some interesting data on openings and applicants in specific fields:
| Openings | Applicants | Apps/Job | High Quality | %HQ | |
| HS Math | 62 | 524 | 8.5 | 153 | 29% |
| HS Science | 36 | 129 | 3.6 | 62 | 48% |
| HS English | 64 | 255 | 4.0 | 131 | 51% |
| HS Social Studies | 15 | 197 | 13.1 | 95 | 48% |
More applicants want to teach math than the other core high school subjects (trigonometric identities do have a powerful allure). The responding schools saw 8.5 applications for each high school math opening. Competition for science and English positions is half as intense. Social studies openings this year are rarest, but they draw the most relative interest, with 13.1 applicants per opening.
Quality doesn't correspond to quantity. Administrators reviewing the apps are finding fewer than 30% of the high school math applicants are "High Quality", compared to a muster-passing rate of about 50% for science, English, and social studies.
SASD does not break down data for openings in high school French. But I'll be keeping my French dictionary and my English certification handy!
Time for you to come back and take a teaching position CAH :)
My daughter, fresh out of SDSU with a BS in Family and Consumer Science Education, that's Home Economics for us oldsters, and one of only 3 or 4 graduates in that discipline, took a job in a small SD school. Two weeks ago she was contacted by an administrator in the Pierre school district. It seems as though a FACS teacher in the junior high resigned late in the year and they don't have any applicants. There are schools dropping FACS programs because they can't find replacements for teachers who are retiring.