Teacher vacancies have continued to rise in public schools across Arizona for the past five years as teachers’ wages remain unlivable and their class sizes increase.
According to the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association (ASPAA) almost 9,000 teaching positions still need to be filled for the upcoming school year.
Additionally, in September, the ASPAA concluded that over 75% of teaching positions either remain vacant or were filled by “individuals not meeting standard teacher requirements”.
Marisol Garcia, The Arizona Education Association President, argued the state legislature must increase funding for public schools so students can remain competitive and teachers can feel respected.
“Salary is an issue, because, you know, you could be working somewhere for 20 years and still be making $50,000 and you can’t find a place to rent, right?” Garcia said. “We have the largest class sizes in the country. So it’s not uncommon for me to have 32 kids times, you know, the six classes I taught, so we’re talking about close to 180 kids a day.”
According to the National Education Association (NEA), since 2019, the number of teachers in Arizona’s public schools decreased by nearly 14,000 by the 2022-2023 school year.
Additional data from the same NEA report ranked Arizona 46 out of 51 for its average public school teacher salary in the 2019-2020 school year. By 2023, the state was ranked 32.
Despite the increase in the average wage, teachers still did not make enough to meet the standard cost of living in the state.
In December 2023, in The Governor’s Education Retention Task Force Research and Analysis Report, Gov. Katie Hobbs said “The top paid teacher with a bachelor’s degree in Arizona makes $52,130, which is still less than the minimum living wage for the state; regardless of level of experience, a teacher with a bachelor’s degree in Arizona with one child cannot afford the basic standard of living.”
Crissy Malouf, a 5th-grade teacher at Sonoran Sky Elementary School who has taught at the school for 20 years, said teachers do not get paid enough for what they do and explained how other factors beyond wages affect teacher retention, such as growing class sizes.
“I have seen young teachers leave because they were burned out,” Malouf said. “I have also seen amazing teachers pushed out because of class sizes.”
In addition to smaller wages and larger class sizes, other teachers, including the AEA’s President Garcia, said they were required to buy resources using their paychecks after being underfunded year after year.
“I taught for two years in California, and I came here to Arizona and realized I was getting paid half as much,” Garcia said. “My first day in the classroom, they handed me a mini trash bag with some staplers and some tissues, and I realized wow this is a problem.”
Similarly, Teri Wight, a teacher at Desert Shadows Middle School, said, “Most teachers purchase needed materials on their own. I purchase Kleenex, Clorox wipes, hand sanitizer, pencils, whiteboard markers, glue sticks, lined paper, construction paper, children’s books in Spanish, and motivational rewards like stickers, candies, small prizes, just to name a few items.”
Wight also explained that other teachers at the school buy monthly memberships to Kahoot, Blooket and other learning apps to make their classes more “fun and engaging” which can be costly.
Garcia criticized the legislature for the routinely underfunded classrooms and argued their continuous budget cuts produced difficult working conditions for teachers over the past five years.
“The legislature has neglected to invest in facilities. And so air conditioners break. We have tiles falling down.” She said. “You have to pay people, you have to treat them with respect, and you have to make sure that their working conditions are not just livable, but thrivable.”
Edited by Shi Bradley
