Boston Public Schools working to fill 1,000+ openings before start of the school year

BOSTON — With just one month until the first day of school, it’s crunch time to try to fill more than a thousand job openings at Boston Public Schools.

“We are actively working with our recruitment team,” said Drew Echelson, acting superintendent for Boston Public Schools.

He says there’s an increase in job openings for the district this upcoming school year partly because they’ve added hundreds of new jobs.

“We’ve made huge investments in Boston Public Schools – new librarians, new social workers, new school counselors, new opportunities for school nurses across all of our BPS schools, and so there’s a lot of hiring to do,” said Echelson.

BPS has more than a thousand job openings right now for the district which employs about 11,000 people.

Echelson says 260 of those vacancies are for teachers.

“The number of staff that we need to fill particularly in our teacher roles, we feel really confident that we’ll be ready to go by the start of school,” said Echelson.

Boston Teachers Union president Jessica Tang says hundreds of thousands of teachers have left the job since the pandemic nationwide after a couple challenging years in and out of the classroom.

“I think with even the disrespect towards the profession and disregard directed towards educators and what we do certainly is demoralizing,” said Tang.

She says she’s glad Massachusetts isn’t lowering the standard just to hire more teachers like other states.

“What we need to do is actually raise the teaching and learning conditions, so that we can continue to attract highly qualified educators and retain them, which is another important piece of the shortage,” said Tang.

The need to hire is not just for full time teachers.

“We’re really looking to also increase our substitute teacher pool to make sure we have a large number of substitute teachers should the situation warrant educators needing to go on short term leave because of covid,” said Echelson.

If you’d like more information on the job openings at Boston Public Schools this year, head to this website: TeachBoston.org

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