Oregon’s education workforce challenges are as varied as its landscape.

While researching workforce shortages for OSBA’s Focus on Critical Issues journal on workforce shortages, we conducted an e-mail survey of school district and ESD human resource directors in February, 2001, to learn what challenges they face and how they’re combating staff shortages. We received 36 replies from throughout Oregon – Eastern Oregon, the Portland metro area, mid-Willamette Valley, central Oregon, southern Oregon, ESDs and several small, remote districts throughout Oregon that fell into their own category.

While this wasn’t an overwhelming response, it gave us a good sample.

In general we found: Smaller, rural districts have resigned themselves to losing talent to larger, urban districts, while all schools face shortages of special education teachers and "hard to get" specialists in music, bilingual education, math and science. To get and keep good staff, the trend statewide is to promote a good continuing education program and "groom" administrators from within.

We asked what recruiting and retention challenges school districts and ESDs face, the staff shortage areas, and what strategies they’re using. Their responses are included here by region. Often only two or three challenges, shortages or strategies are listed – mainly because several respondents replied with the same answers, so we didn’t repeat them.