(Photo illustration by Natasha Vicens/PublicSource)
High teacher pay at PPS means some stay for decades, but some schools keep few longtime educators.
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Most of Pittsburgh Public Schools’ $676 million budget is allocated toward staffing, yet not all schools in PPS are sufficiently staffed.
At Pittsburgh Morrow K-8 in Brighton Heights, for instance, students did not have a full-time nurse for the whole of last year. A parent of two kids who recently attended the school said her child’s third-grade class was split up at least nine times because of full-time and substitute teacher shortages. The school also lacked enough custodians and paraprofessionals at times.
PPS identifies hard-to-staff schools based on criteria such as the rate of resignations and retirements, absence rates and rates of teachers who apply to transfer out. Eight PPS schools — Faison, King, Liberty, Manchester, Perry, Sterrett, UPrep and Westinghouse — were identified as hard-to-staff for school years 2022 to 2024.
Nina Esposito-Visgitis, president of the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers [PFT] said, in her experience, the district consistently sees teacher shortages in areas like math, science, special education, and adjacent areas like physical and occupational therapy, and vision and hearing specialists.
PPS has relatively well-paid teachers and classrooms with low student-teacher ratios. In 2022, full-time teachers at PPS earned about $83,375 on average. In Pennsylvania, the average teacher’s salary was about $73,070. The district has increased the number of employees even as student enrollment has declined. In 2022, PPS employed about 4,265 people across the district of 18,510 students.
The district appears to lack a robust strategy for addressing the gaps in staffing, and as it approaches a new budget season, anticipated funding shortfalls might exacerbate the issue.
Students with higher needs, teachers with less experience
Research suggests that teaching experience is positively associated with increased student achievement throughout a teacher’s career. Although the most noticeable improvements in teaching effectiveness typically occur within the initial five years, continued increases persist into the second and third decades of their careers.
Teacher experience in PPS schools varies in line with other disparities.
In schools such as Brookline K-8, Roosevelt K-5 in Carrick and Greenfield K-8, the teachers have an average teaching experience of 20 years. In other schools like UPrep Milliones 6-12 in the Hill District, teachers average less than a decade of experience.
This follows a statewide trend in which Black and Hispanic students and those from low-income families have the least-experienced teachers.
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