Kansas Board of Education approves teacher licensing change

The state’s six innovative school districts will be able to hire unlicensed teachers for hard-to-fill positions under a proposal approved Tuesday by the Kansas Board of Education.

Those districts will be able to hire unlicensed teachers and issue them special certificates, which will be valid for one year, whenever they cannot find a suitable candidate who holds a teaching license.

The candidates must hold either a relevant college degree or professional certification for the position.

The proposal, which passed by a vote of 6-4, looked as though it would fail until Ken Willard, whose district includes parts of Sedgwick and surrounding counties, offered a few tweaks that were enough to entice Wichita’s Kathy Busch to cast the deciding vote in its favor.

The changes Busch needed to vote for the policy were a more explicit degree requirement and greater oversight for the state board of education. The license waivers will go before a district’s local school board and then to the state board for final approval.

Willard’s amendment also limits the policy to the state’s current six innovative school districts: McPherson, Concordia, Hugoton, Marysville, Blue Valley and Kansas City, Kan. The board could take action next year to open it to more districts.

The proposal comes at a time when more teachers than in previous years are retiring or leaving the state for teaching positions elsewhere. More than 3,700 teachers have retired, left the state or taken jobs outside of education in the past year.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Busch said of a growing teacher shortage.

However, Kansas City superintendent Cynthia Lane made it clear that the policy is not intended to address the teacher shortage. Lane said her district would be strategic in its use of the policy. She said it would allow her to hire a certified nurse to teach a course on working as a nurse’s aide, for example.

The policy has received significant criticism from the Kansas National Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.

Sherri Scwhanz, the KNEA’s vice president, said the concern is that teachers who have not been formally trained as educators will lack the skill needed to succeed in the classroom and that students will pay the price.

Janet Waugh, a board member whose district includes Kansas City, said the policy change will exacerbate the problem of low morale among the state’s teachers, which she argued was helping drive teachers to other states.

“Teachers are taking this as another put-down,” Waugh observed.

However, Willard argued the board’s primary duty was to students rather than teachers. He argued that if the board voted down the policy, it would be overlooking “the needs of students who will have their needs met by this proposal.”

“The sign on our wall says ‘Students come first in every board decision,’ ” Willard said.

This story was originally published July 14, 2015 at 5:10 PM with the headline "Kansas Board of Education approves teacher licensing change."