The Tifton Gazette starts a series of stories today looking at teachers leaving the classroom. The series will run the next few weeks.

Teachers leaving the classroom has the potential of creating a crisis in schools across the nation. The severity of that possible crisis remains unclear because there is no definitive data on a teacher shortage.

An estimated 49.5 million children were enrolled in public schools in fall 2021, and in the 2020-21 school year, there were 3 million teachers working in public schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

However, the U.S. Government Accountability Office analysis reported 233,000 fewer public school teachers in 2021 compared with 2019. And, it noted that teacher shortages are most acute in western states, rural and urban areas, and high-poverty communities, and in subject areas such as foreign language, science and special education.

Negative perceptions of the teaching profession and a “perceived lack of support for current teachers are among key recruitment and retention challenges,” the GAO found.

The CNHI News series will review the teacher shortage in the company’s markets ranging from Georgia to several other states across the nation. During the past two months, CNHI reporters have sought to clarify this issue and identify the issues that may be driving it.

The Institute of Education Sciences, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, estimates that at least half of all public schools had three teacher vacancies on average because of factors such as too few candidates, a lack of qualified candidates or salary and benefit concerns.

In Georgia and some other states, teachers are challenged in how they teach or what they teach by legislators creating laws and guidelines regarding history and social studies classes, under the headings of “divisive concepts” or “critical race theory.”

As one history teacher said in a Tifton Gazette report a few months ago, “Like many educators in Georgia, I can’t figure out what I can or can’t teach under the law, and my school district’s administrators don’t seem to understand the law’s prohibitions either.”

The pandemic posed numerous challenges to teachers during the past few years, with classes canceled, moving to remote learning then a mix of remote and in-class learning, before returning to all in-class instruction.

What can be done to retain teachers? What can be done to attract new teachers to classrooms?

Hopefully, the “Leaving the Classroom” series will spark serious thought and discussions to answer those questions.