Virginia education officials took emergency action Thursday to head off a crisis that could have impacted students and teachers across the commonwealth.
A backlog of more than 15,000 licenses were due to expire June 30 unless they were renewed.
The superintendent of public instruction called an emergency meeting of the State Board of Education Thursday to say the work can’t be done on time. The quick fix is a year’s extension.
“There’s been a lot of angst, and teachers have been concerned because, I mean, this is their livelihood,” said Leslie Houston of Fairfax Education Association. “For those of us who want to remain in the system, we need our licenses renewed.”
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“I’m glad to see this new state school superintendent taking decisive action in ensuring a high-quality teacher in every classroom,” Virginia Association of School Superintendents Executive Director Scott Brabrand said.
In addition to the licensing extension, more staff will be hired to tackle the backlog, and a new online renewal system could be up and running by the end of the summer – part of the license renewal is still done manually on paper.
“There’s a short-term solution that we’re going to go deal with right now and then a longer-term solution in order to make this process so much easier,” Gov. Glenn Youngkin said. “It’s silly. We should be able to process these in a much more efficient way.”
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State superintendent Lisa Coons has only been on the job for a few weeks but says she’s already decided the looming and growing teacher shortage must be her top priority.
“We need to move forward and we need to be elevating teachers and those that support teachers in public education much more strongly now or this crisis in terms of being able to staff our schools is only going to increase,” Brabrand said.
State education officials promised more solutions to come to try to keep current teachers in place and to make sure licensing isn’t a barrier to new teachers.
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