The number of teachers in Missouri leaving their jobs declined in the 2023-24 school year, but a new report shows that the state’s teacher turnover rate is still at historic highs.
The report from St. Louis University’s PRiME Center found teacher turnover in Missouri peaked after the pandemic, with 15.5% switching school districts within the state or leaving for a private school or a different state's public schools, or leaving the profession altogether.
Cameron Anglum, the report’s author and assistant professor at Lehigh University, said turnover has decreased to 14.6% but is still higher than it’s been in 15 years.
“Over that time period, high teacher turnover puts really large stresses on school districts,” Anglum said. “When more teachers are leaving, we need to replace those teachers with other teachers, with new teachers or teachers from other districts.”
Anglum said turnover leads to more teacher shortages, especially in hard-to-fill roles including special education or STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) positions, or in districts that serve student populations with higher rates of poverty.
Local districts are also rebounding
The Hickman Mills School District, which serves families in south Kansas City, has seen its teacher retention numbers shoot up in recent years.
Casey Klapmeyer, the district’s deputy superintendent, said Hickman Mills struggled to keep teachers in the job even before the pandemic hit. He said about a fourth of the district’s teachers left each year until voters approved higher taxes to raise pay.
The pay raise took the district’s teacher salaries from the lowest in the metropolitan area to the highest. Klapmeyer said teacher retention now sits at about 85%.
But with vacancies in many of the state’s school districts, he said it’s still a challenge to retain teachers.
“All of us are always trying to vie for the same small pool for the vacancies that we do have,” Klapmeyer said. “On the positive side, for teachers, it opens up choices every year that they can make, whether to stay or go somewhere else.”
Nearly three years ago, one of Missouri's top education officials said the state was at a “point of crisis” amid a chronic teacher shortage. A commission formed by the state’s Board of Education was tasked with finding solutions — with pay being one of the group’s biggest takeaways.
Missouri has long paid its teachers some of the lowest salaries in the nation, but recently boosted minimum teacher salaries from $25,000 to $40,000 a year.
School districts in Kansas City have already been inching up their pay to stay competitive, including in the Park Hill School District. In April, the school district passed a tax levy to raise salaries with the goal of being in the top five for starting pay in the Kansas City area.
Dr. Amy Dillon, the school district’s assistant superintendent of human resources, said their experience reflects statewide trends. After the pandemic, she said teacher retention was in the low 80s. In the 2023-24 school year, that number jumped up to 90%.
Dillon said teachers have an increasing number of responsibilities, but without the flexibility of remote work that became more commonplace in other jobs after the pandemic began.
“I think you combine the challenge of the position with the rate of pay compared to other positions that are in the world, and I think that that becomes a challenging situation,” Dillon said.
On top of raising pay, schools in Missouri have recruited more teachers of color. Anglum said 17% of the state’s new educators in the 2023-24 school year were teachers of color, a significant increase over the past 15 years.
However, the report found teachers of color leave their positions more frequently than their white peers. From 2022-23 to 2023-24, about 20% of nonwhite teachers left their positions, compared to about 14% of white teachers.
Anglum said the number of teachers of color in the state doesn’t come close to the 32% of nonwhite students. Having more diversity of teachers, he said, will help show the profession is for everyone.
“When schools employ relatively few teachers of color, and new teachers of color enter, they might feel some type of professional isolation,” Anglum said. “However, when we recruit and retain those types of teachers at improved rates, I think that will decline.”
In the Hickman Mills School District, Klapmeyer said the state’s traditional four-year programs aren’t producing a very diverse workforce. So they’ve been working with different pipelines for new teachers — including The Educator Academy, a Kansas City teacher residency program.
“If you're just relying on one pipeline, you're waiting for that pipeline to change how they're recruiting and getting people, a more diverse population,” Klapmeyer said.
He said they’ve also worked on improving their climate and culture to retain teachers, especially when the district didn’t have the funding to raise salaries.
That includes sending regular surveys to gauge job satisfaction, like if teachers feel appreciated and heard or if people of different cultures and beliefs are celebrated or honored in the workplace.
Klapmeyer said focusing on Hickman Mills’ climate and culture has also helped combat higher rates of turnover in urban schools.
According to the report, the state’s urban and rural areas experienced higher turnover compared to their suburban counterparts. Almost 19% of teachers in urban districts left their positions, compared to only 12% in suburban districts.
Urban and rural schools tend to educate students with higher levels of needs, according to Anglum. He said many of the state's rural schools have turned to the four-day school week in the hopes of attracting and keeping more teachers, but findings of a future report show on average the shorter schedule isn’t substantially improving those outcomes.
Because rural schools were most impacted by Missouri’s low teacher pay, Anglum said he was hopeful that the state’s recent salary boost will improve turnover.
Another popular tactic for urban and rural areas, according to Anglum, is “Grow Your Own" programs. They allow grants to be given to support students and staff in their own schools to become teachers, but Anglum said those programs have become threatened by federal funding cuts.
“It takes particular types of teachers sometimes to be particularly effective in certain settings, and it also sometimes takes a particular type of person to be attracted to live in a certain type of setting,” Anglum said. “When we open up the pathways for teachers to enter the profession in those particular settings and encourage them at an early age, I think that that could be fruitful.”
Keeping teachers in the job
Administrators in the Park Hill School District are also looking beyond pay to retain teachers, including improving benefits, checking employee morale with surveys and allowing teachers to work virtually when they have professional development days.
Dillon said the district also used its “Grow Your Own” program to hire 25 teachers. She said they've also added a well-being coordinator to serve as a mental health liaison to connect staff with therapy providers, the district’s employee assistance program and other resources.
“It's a challenging environment out there to try to get resources, to be able to get appointments, to be able to talk to therapists… so we wanted to provide someone for our staff,” Dillon said. “We have really built up an amazing program for our students with our mental health kind of resource center, but we wanted to do the same for staff.”
Another area of need the report identified relates to the state’s newest teachers. Anglum said 40% of Missouri teachers leave after their first five years on the job.
“We are losing teachers that still stand to make significant inroads in their effectiveness over the years, and that translates to student outcomes,” Anglum said.
Klapmeyer said that trend has made districts add multiple layers of support for new teachers. In Hickman Mills, teachers have a colleague mentor, district-level coaches who work with a cohort of new teachers and targeted professional development.
He said the district’s improved academic performance in recent years can't be disconnected from its improved teacher retention.
“We've attracted and kept better teachers who are getting better at their practice every year, and our kids are the recipients of that, and we're seeing that in our student achievement scores,” Klapmeyer said.
