Alaskans will no longer need college degrees for most state jobs, under an issued Tuesday by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

The action is needed because of the labor shortage that affects Alaska and the nation, Dunleavy said in a statement.

“Today people can gain knowledge, skills and abilities through on-the-job experience. If we’re going to address our labor shortage, we have to recognize the value that apprenticeships, on-the-job training, military training, trade schools and other experience provides applicants. If a person can do the job, we shouldn’t be holding anyone back just because they don’t have a degree,” the Republican governor said in the statement.

The administrative order instructs the state’s personnel managers to review job classifications and positions and identify those for which practical experience or alternate training is an appropriate substitute for college degrees. Future job postings will list relevant experience that can substitute for college degrees when reasonable, according to the order.

Labor shortages “are impacting the delivery of essential state services,” the order said. “At present, there are not enough qualified applicants to fill all the state’s job vacancies. This unprecedented demand for labor throughout the State of Alaska requires the government to be flexible in recruiting, hiring, and retaining a talented and able workforce capable of serving the people of Alaska.”

With Dunleavy’s order, Alaska joins a list of states that have formally removed college degrees as requirements for most state jobs. Others include , and .

State lawmakers, meanwhile, are contemplating steps to address the state’s labor shortage.

The state Senate Labor and Commerce Committee has been holding a series of hearings about workforce challenges in both the public and private sectors. So far, the committee has heard from state commissioners and agency directors, municipal government officials, business representaves, educators, health care providers and others.

The workforce challenge has been a “resounding theme over and over,” Julie Sande, commissioner of the Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development, told the committee on Jan. 20, during the first of those hearings.

Meeting the challenge will require a wide variety of policies and responses, Sande said.

“We recognize if we don’t have a healthy workforce, if we don’t have housing, if we don’t have child care, we aren’t going to be able to effectively move the economy forward for the state of Alaska,” she told the committee.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

Two months into the school year, the 2,800-student district is seeking an extra cafeteria worker, two additional bus drivers and four paraeducators — meaning the school system is operating at about 7 percent below capacity for those roles. Periodically, district administrators have had to fill in as substitute teachers and the transportation director, normally a desk position, has been forced to drive bus routes.

“The impact of a staffing shortage feels more severe this year than it has in the past,” Tukwila Human Resources Director Aaron Draganov told ����Ӱ��, noting that the district recently saw an “unusually high number of retirements,” especially in transportation.

But just a few miles to the northeast, on Mercer Island, the story is completely different.

Located between Seattle and Bellevue in a community that is home to a Microsoft co-founder and numerous retired pro athletes, and where typical home values land around $2 million, according to Zillow, Mercer Island School District has largely avoided such staffing woes. 

“We are not experiencing the same struggles as other districts,” Executive Director of Human Resources Erin Battersby told ����Ӱ��. Over 98 percent of support staff roles in the 4,500-student district are filled, according to data she provided. 

“If you want to talk about staff shortages, we’re probably not the district to talk to, because we’re doing pretty well,” the HR director said.

The contrasting circumstances in the two school systems represent a fissure in staffing patterns well beyond the Seattle area. 

During a school year marked by fears of K-12 labor shortages — with nationwide reports of , superintendents and school cafeterias due to a lack of workers — a new analysis out of Washington state quantifies the depth of disparities in teacher and staff vacancy rates between high- and low-poverty school systems.

The research, published Nov. 9 as a by the Center for Education Data and Research, combed through the job postings listed in three-quarters of Washington school districts, which account for 98 percent of all students in the state.

Poorer districts were in need of paraeducators and transportation workers at roughly twice and three times the rates, respectively, of their more affluent counterparts, the analysis revealed. They were also seeking a higher share of janitors, nurses, special educators and teachers for English language learners, among other roles — posing yet another setback for the very students most in need of catching up on learning missed during the pandemic.

“The shortages are breaking along existing lines of disparity,” Dan Goldhaber, a University of Washington education economist who co-authored the analysis, told ����Ӱ��. 

The data flush out an emerging nationwide picture of school staffing that previously included little systematic accounting of districts’ on-the-ground conditions, instead relying on local anecdotes and high-level numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

“Having the Washington data is absolutely important to understand which types of workers districts are struggling to hire the most,” said Chad Aldeman, policy director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab and a in critiquing coverage and public perception of school staffing shortages.

Teachers for special education and English learning programs were the most sought-after instructional roles, while districts reported that they most needed teacher assistants and athletic coaches as support staff.

Before the pandemic, public K-12 education employed about 8 million workers, according to federal data, but that number fell to a low of 7.3 million during the first half of the 2020-21 school year. The count has since rebounded to about 7.7 million, but the sector has yet to fully make up its pandemic losses. 

Last year, schools that went remote often didn’t need as many bus drivers, janitors or other support roles, explained Aldeman. Now as districts bring those roles back, they have to compete with mega-employers, such as Amazon and Uber. 

This is a “very competitive hiring season,” he said. “It’s definitely an applicant’s market in the sense of, they can be kind of choosy in where they want to go.”

Some of the nation’s largest districts reported hundreds of unfilled positions as of late October. Palm Beach County Schools told ����Ӱ�� that they had 1,044 vacancies, including for 351 teachers. Hillsborough County Public Schools, which includes Tampa Bay, reported 1,274 openings, 432 of which were teaching roles. And Chicago Public Schools said it was still hiring for over 3,400 staff, including 680 teachers.

More affluent districts may have an easier time filling positions because salaries are generally higher and the work is seen as less stressful. But the reasons explaining those vacancies remain blurry. With a huge federal windfall landing on districts’ doorsteps thanks to $122 billion for schools in the American Rescue Plan passed in March, many districts are hiring for new positions that never previously existed in efforts to lower class sizes. 

“We don’t have a good sense of the cause of the job openings,” said Aldeman. “Is it because the high-poverty districts can’t find people, or is it that they’re able to hire more right now?”

Regardless, the disparities in vacancy rates worry Tequilla Brownie, executive vice president of The New Teacher Project. She knows that when under-resourced schools have high shares of empty positions, it can translate into long-lasting instructional deficits for poor students. 

Research from her organization found that, in Arkansas, where teachers are in short supply statewide, students in high-poverty districts were . Black students were five times more likely than white students to attend school in a high-shortage district.

Vacancies have been “overwhelmingly felt” by Black and brown students, she told ����Ӱ��. Now, with shortages continuing to fall along lines of race and class, she fears “kids will not get access to the learning acceleration and the learning recovery that they need because you don’t have enough effective teachers.”

Some districts, however, appear to have broken the mold. In Dallas, teachers receive extra compensation — sometimes netting over $100,000 per year — to work in high-poverty schools. The incentive seems to have helped keep educators around: The district estimates just a 17 percent turnover rate from this past year, down from as high as 23 percent in 2015 (though the most recent figure is a slight bump above its 14 percent rate in 2020). 

“We have highly successful teachers who have proven they can be successful at a lot of [high-needs] schools,” Dallas Superintendent Michael Hinojosa told ����Ӱ��. “That has definitely insulated us in comparison to other major urban districts.”

Rural districts, too, have seen shortages — sometimes more acutely than urban schools. Data from the study out of Washington show rural school systems had higher vacancy rates for special educators than suburban or urban districts, while urban districts had a greater need for science and math teachers. Bus driver, paraeducator and athletic worker shortages were much steeper in rural schools than other districts.

Schools looking to lure high-quality educators, perhaps mimicking the compensation scheme in Dallas, should budget carefully for the long term, advised Aldeman. Extra cash from relief dollars is available now, but it won’t be around forever.

“Thanks to the infusion of federal funds, districts may be tempted to increase base salaries,” he said. “But that short-term thinking could lead to layoffs or other painful decisions when the federal funds run out in a few short years.”

Another strategy for districts to help bolster their teacher corps may revolve around the staff already within the school building, said Brownie. These workers, such as paraprofessionals, who also tend to better represent the diversity of schools’ student bodies than credentialed teachers, can be helped to acquire the skills and training needed to move into full-time instructor roles.

“There definitely are ways that districts, and maybe in partnership with higher ed institutions, could think more innovatively about trying to help those teachers fast-track to get trained and then be placed into classrooms,” she said.

A report published in March by the RAND Corporation found that nearly half of all Black teachers said they at the end of last school year — threatening to further widen diversity gaps in school staffing. Currently, about 4 in 5 educators nationwide are white, compared to less than half of all public school students.  Though this year’s data on teacher turnover are not yet available, the RAND finding underscores the need for schools to consider tactics, such as those suggested by Brownie, to diversify their teaching force. 

When schools are short on staff, it’s the families and teachers who feel the effects, said Annette Anderson, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Safe and Healthy Schools.

The K-12 expert is also a mother of three students in the Baltimore City Public School system and, recently, around the dinner table, her eighth-grade daughter reported that her sixth-grade cousin had been in her class that day. The youngsters’ cohorts had been merged due to lack of staff.

“That’s a concern for me, because that means my daughter is not getting the level of instruction that she should in her classroom,” the Baltimore mother told ����Ӱ��.

“It’s not the teacher’s fault that took off,” Anderson continued. She empathizes as a former classroom teacher and principal. “It’s not the fault of the administrator, who’s trying to figure it out in the zero hour.”

“That’s a process and a policy issue,” she said.

On Tuesdays, three Little Caesars stores across Oakland County, Michigan, make 273 pizzas in the morning even before they open for business. On Wednesdays, another 320 pies are out the door before noon.

But their customers aren’t sports fans ditching work to watch a day game. They’re students in the Huron Valley Schools in Highland, Michigan, northwest of Detroit. 

“Our little kids cheer when the pizzas come. It’s one thing our kids can count on,” said Sara Simmerman, food and nutrition supervisor for the 8,600-student district.

Like most districts across the country, Huron Valley is facing unprecedented food and labor shortages caused by what say is nearing a “global transport systems collapse.” Experts say as the economy reopened following lockdowns, multiple industries — including those involved in delivering food and supplies to schools — have faced increased demand they can’t meet.

Many predict the could extend throughout the rest of the school year. Forced to adapt their meal programs to a grab-and-go system last year when schools shut down for remote learning, school nutrition departments are now scrambling to find menu items and enlisting front office staff and school administrators to serve meals.

“We’ve been told it may even get worse before it gets better,” Simmerman said. The district’s partnership with MAC Foods Group, which owns the Little Caesars stores, began before the pandemic, and has become a rare source of stability as the district increasingly improvises its in-house menus. 

The unpredictability of deliveries adds to the frustration. A satellite kitchen that serves the district’s elementary schools recently received only 35 of  400 cases of food ordered. A few days later, 700 cases arrived at once.

“You never know what you’re going to get,” Simmerman said. “It’s amazing how many kids want to eat salad when you don’t have lettuce.”

A nationwide is one piece of the complex puzzle that determines whether Los Angeles students get applesauce or schools across Michigan’s Oakland County offer chocolate milk. 

“Deliveries of goods and foods are extremely delayed. It now takes an average of eight weeks to receive an item that previously showed up in two to three weeks,” said Lieling Hwang, assistant director of nutrition services for the Long Beach Unified School District in California. “Typically, these deliveries are coming in short, as well.”

That means middle and high school students aren’t getting their favorite “spicy cheese crunchers,” and the whole wheat croissants that were used to make breakfast sandwiches have been discontinued, Hwang said.

‘Don’t have the luxury’

Some school nutrition directors are scheduling deliveries after hours or directing distributors to central warehouses and then using district staff to get food to local schools, said Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced in assistance to help school nutrition departments keep up with rising costs. The funds will provide schools with fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy products. This would free up other funds to offer hiring bonuses to address staffing shortages. But Pratt-Heaver noted that agricultural commodities usually account for only 15 to 20 percent of what districts serve, and they still have to rely on vendors and distributors for other food and supplies. 

The lack of paper products, for example, is almost as bad as the shortage of food, said Sharon Glosson, executive director of the North East Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas. 

“There really isn’t an alternative to a plate,” she said, adding that in the past, staff would use multiple plates or containers because some children like to keep their food separated. “We don’t have the luxury to do that anymore.” Elementary schools in the district, meanwhile, use plastic trays with compartments, but washing them takes labor, and the district still has almost 150 unfilled positions.

Labor shortages are also a challenge for MAC Foods Group.When stores are short-staffed, Simmerman and administrative assistant Colleen Armstrong pitch in. 

“We go and deliver the pizzas ourselves if we have to,” Simmerman said. 

Costs are ‘soaring’

Nutrition directors say that while students might not get their favorite entrees, they’re keeping children fed. Parents don’t have to pay for school meals because Congress made them free for all students this year. But it’s the shortages students face when they go home that Hwang and others worry most about. 

“These issues do affect students outside of school as the cost of foods [and] supplies is soaring,” Hwang said. “Scarcity and unaffordability … makes food insecurity even more pronounced now.”

Congress created the Pandemic EBT — electronic benefit transfer — program to cover the cost of food for students while schools were closed. The American Rescue Plan, the relief package passed in March, continued the program through the summer and this school year. But the program is only meant to serve students who are learning remotely.

An increase in the benefits low-income families receive through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program took effect , providing about $36 more a month per person. But the supply chain bottlenecks are causing at the grocery store, and are experiencing some of the same shortages as schools. 

Affected by labor shortages, wildfires and the pandemic, the Oregon Food Bank, for one, has seen a drop in food donations as well as higher prices at a time when demand for services has doubled. The disruption means less fresh produce and affects supplies at school food pantries that low-income families depend on for weekend meals, said spokeswoman Ashley Mumm. The food bank provided funds to the school pantry programs so they could stock up at grocery outlets and big box stores like Costco.

“More and more barriers are placed in front of families,” said Lucy Coady, director of No Kid Hungry, a national campaign of the nonprofit Share Our Strength. “This is affecting every aspect of how hungry kids are fed across the country.”