Department of Education data finds teacher vacancies continue to rise in Mississippi

Teaching vacancies grew by 7% across the state in comparison to the 2022-2023 school year, representing just under 2,800 open positions. 

But even amid a continued rise in vacancies, MDE data shows they’re not distributed evenly by neither region nor grade level. 

At more than 800 vacancies each, elementary and high schools more than doubled the open teaching positions at Mississippi middle schools. STEM courses like general sciences, biology, chemistry and math also saw high-single to double digit increases over last year. 

Toren Ballard, executive director of K-12 Education Policy at Mississippi First, says state officials need to do more to convince teachers to stay. 

“I think the biggest takeaway from this data is that the positive effects of the 2022 teacher pay raise are starting to wear off,” he told MPB News. “Due to inflation the average teacher salary in Mississippi is now worth $2,000 less than when the pay raise first went into effect. This is critical because teachers consistently rank compensation as the most important factor in determining their career plans.” 

In a near unanimous, $246 million appropriation, Mississippi’s legislature approved an average annual raise of more than $5,000 for the 2022-2023 school year, as well as yearly increases of $400 and larger bumps of $1,200 to $1,350 every five years. 

But Mississippi remains close to bottom nationally for public school teacher compensation, and Ballard worries what continued challenges to both recruitment and retention will mean for students themselves. 

“When districts have vacancies they’re more likely to have to rely on teachers who either don’t have much experience teaching in the classroom, or those who are teaching a subject they aren’t licensed for,” he said. “While we don’t know enough to say there’s causation here, we do generally see a correlation between student test scores and the percentage of teachers in a given district that are inexperienced or teaching a subject they don’t have a license in.” 

Courtney Van Cleve, executive director of educator continuum at MDE, says the data is a good jumping off point to better understand the vacancies -- and that certain programs have been expanded to try and help address them on a large scale.

“With elementary education, in terms of recruitment, we’ve been working with our Mississippi universities to offer increased pathways for individuals intending to become elementary teachers,” she told MPB News, adding the agency has also approved alternate pathway programs where teachers can obtain certification in subjects other than those they currently teach. 

“We’re already at 10 pathways with our universities and expect more on that front. With special education recruitment, we’ve requested the legislature to approve continued funding for the Mississippi teacher residency which offers special ed licensure.”

MDE’s report shows that the rise is more pronounced in certain regions of the state: both the first and fourth congressional districts, representing northeast and coastal Mississippi respectively, actually saw a decline in educator vacancies. 

But in the second congressional district, which is made up almost entirely by the Delta, the vacancies rose by 40%. 

Ballard says such a large geographical discrepancy in the data underscores just how varied conditions can be between different regions of the state. 

“There can be a lot of reasons when looking at a region as large as the Delta, so we don’t want to overgeneralize. But anecdotally we hear that hiring teachers in rural areas like the Delta is much more difficult,” he told MPB News. 

“Many communities in the second congressional district are also a stone’s throw away from Arkansas, and that’s important because Arkansas recently boosted its minimum teacher salary by $14,000,” said Ballard. “So because teacher pay in Mississippi hasn’t kept pace, there’s this huge incentive to drive maybe half an hour over the border and increase your take home pay by thousands of dollars.”