Help wanted: Why Fairhaven schools are struggling to fill so many job openings

FAIRHAVEN — "I remember as a kid my mom saying don’t be a teacher; there’s no jobs, everything’s full. Well, that tide has turned."

That was Fairhaven School Committee Chair Pam Kuechler's reaction after hearing the staffing report delivered at recent meeting by Superintendent Tara Kohler, who shared that the district has been struggling to fill 17 positions. The current openings are:

• Paraprofessionals (4)

• Board certified behavior analyst, or BCBA (1)

• Teachers (4)

• Long-term substitutes (2)

• Clerical, coaching and other postings (5)

• Assistant principal for the high school (1)

To illustrate the drastic increase in difficulty of finding job candidates, Kohler compared the numbers of applicants the jobs have gotten in different years. In the past few years, most have dropped to less than half the number of applicants jobs got in years before the pandemic.

Shrinking candidate pools

"If you look at those numbers, back in the spring of '17 we had 54 candidates," she said of the high school assistant principal job, citing the same number of candidates in 2019. "And in the summer of '22 we had 13 candidates."

When it came to the position of high school English language arts, or ELA, teacher, the data presented showed postings attracted a pool of 160 candidates in 2013, fluctuating in the years between then and 2018 when there were 77 candidates. In winter of 2023, Kohler said the candidate pool for an opening of same job title was 11.

"English used to be a dime a dozen," Kohler said.

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For elementary level paraprofessionals, data showed 105 applicants in 2013, dropping as low as 10 in spring of 2022. By summer, the number of applicants went up to 22, however Kohler said "only five were qualified," citing the Massachusetts requirement that paraprofessionals either having an associate's degree or pass what is known as the ParaPro Assessment.

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