Shoratge of Foreign Language teachers:

My daughter is a senior in high school and her Spanish class is run by someone who speaks 0 Spanish. They have combined Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 students together in the same class using the same online course and assignments. No textbook. The kids are given hand outs with the answers on them to use for the tests in an online class without a live teacher or audio component. The class has met for a month and all they have done outside of the tests is look up words in a Spanish/English dictionary and play dominoes day after day. This is my daughters first year at this school. She has been writing compositions and doing online chat in Spanish before this so looking up a long list of basic words in the dictionary is definitely a step backward. Yes, we need a Spanish teacher!

Shortage of science teachers:

One teacher is doing it all for science at the high school level: physical science, chemistry, physics. This is his second year teaching and he is really burning out, I would not be surprised if he leaves the profession after this year.

Shortage of math teachers:

Like the science above, one teacher is doing it all: algebra, algebra II, geometry, trig, and computer science. He has been a teacher for 38 years and will be retiring in two years. The school is already sweating how to find a replacement. I heard that about five years ago he was juggling science too because they didn’t have a science teacher.

I am not as sure about the specifics of other classes, but the staff in the office have been quite open that they lost a lot of teachers the year before. Even the high school principal is teaching classes all through the second half of the day. I am not sure what he is teaching.