On a Friday morning, to start the day at French Elementary School, second-year teacher Brynn Johnson’s first graders led the way, reading in unison, through their morning reading before recapping the book’s material and themes.

While Johnson gravitated toward teaching at an early age, whether through role-playing as one or her own passion for reading, she now finds herself in a place where she feels she can make the biggest difference.

“First grade is the big reading year,” she said about the grade she settled on teaching. “So, they’ll (the students) come in and they know how to read a little bit, but then a lot of them, throughout the year, I’ll have them reading chapter books.

“And to share my love of reading with them makes me love what I do even more.”

After matriculating through local schools like French, James Irwin Charter Elementary and schools in Cheyenne Mountain District 12, before earning her teaching degree at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Johnson finds herself among a wave of new educators entering a workforce that’s endured years of significant turnover.

Since Colorado began reporting the degree and specific areas of its educator shortages in 2019, the number of unfilled teaching vacancies has begun to decrease over the past two school years. For the 2024-25 school year, this total was nearly cut in half from over 635 to 255.

In Widefield District 3 alone, Johnson said she was one of 10 new teachers fresh out of college starting their careers.

These recent trends are likely due to a combination of factors, including recent state investments in workforce development, partnerships between public and post-secondary education institutions and new affordable options for aspiring educators.

To the west of D-3, Pikes Peak State College is rolling out a new bachelor’s degree of applied science elementary education for K-6 grade licensure. The college’s department chair Althea Jordan said that the new degree was a response to the need of teachers and offers a more affordable pathway into the field.

Along with teaching state teaching standards and preparation requirements, the new program will also emphasize teaching digital literacy and culturally responsive teaching and offer 800 hours of fieldwork, including a yearlong clinical residency in a local school.

Since signing a memorandum of understanding with District 11 specifically for education workforce development, the college has also had discussions with Ellicott District 22, Harrison District 3 and D-3 to host their incoming student teachers.

“So, we’re really hoping that our community of schools will welcome our students in,” she said. “Because we want them to know that they’re a big part of this preparation because they’re going to be able to work with these students for a year and mentor them and grow them to where they can fit into their community.”

History of workforce shortages

While advocates have been sounding the alarm of a growing number of educators leaving the profession roughly 10 years ago, the reasons for their exit have changed over the years.

In 2017, the nonprofit Public Education and Business Coalition reported a growing number of teachers becoming eligible for retirement alongside a shrinking number of students enrolling in education programs. Jordan acknowledged that the low starting pay of teachers, compared to what is earned with other degrees, has previously turned off some PPSC students from pursuing their education coursework.

These concerns over salaries and the heightened scrutiny of standardized testing have been compounded with increased emotional dysregulation, behavioral problems and reliance on electronic devices since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

For teachers not approaching retirement, more and more simply burnt out.

“When COVID hit, that’s when a lot of our teachers then left,” she said. “So, it’s almost like we’re trying to catch back up to where we were pre-COVID and so, I think we still have a ways to go.”

Colorado’s rural school districts consistently reported the largest percentage of shortages, while subject areas identified as “critical shortage areas” include special education, early childhood education and the core subjects at the high school level.

Along with monitoring ongoing gaps, CDE also developed a retention dashboard to monitor the rates at which educators are staying and leaving public education, which includes retirements, transitions to private schools and relocating to other states.

As for the specific reasons the educators are leaving the profession, a state exit survey conducted in 2025 and released last month indicated that, out of 825 surveyed, 33% moved to a different profession, 33% left for “other” reasons, 22% ceased working because of personal reasons like health and family care and 12% moved on to a different role in education.

The “other” response encapsulated reasons including “administrative or leadership issues, burnout or health concerns, job loss or position changes, relocation, and transitions into new roles inside or outside education.”

The survey also noted that 70% surveyed would be open to returning to public education if specific working conditions improved. These included salary increases, reasonable class sizes, protected planning time, greater special education support and more part-time teaching positions.

“So, those are working condition questions,” said the Colorado Department of Education’s director of research and impact Kristin Kipp. “So, I think that’s absolutely fascinating and a really important thing for us to talk about.”

New Solutions

Kipp said that, in addition to newly licensed teachers, school districts have been filling their individual gaps by hiring long-term substitute teachers, recruiting retired educators, developing teachers through alternative licensure and hiring contracted service providers.

Rather than completing a traditional education program at a college or university, alternative license programs allow those with a bachelor’s degree to teach in a classroom full-time while they are earning their teaching license. This mechanism has seen the most development, growing from 487 educators in 2018 to 878 in 2023, and has been the largest single factor to addressing shortages in recent years.

According to the Colorado Department of Higher Education, while enrollment in traditional education preparation programs still vastly outweighs that of alternative programs, the former has decreased over the past five years, while the latter has increased in four of these years.

Kipp added that the state department is currently rounding out more apprenticeship programs to allow paraprofessionals to earn their licensure while working in classrooms.  

The legislature is currently considering a bill that would streamline the process for teachers from certain states to obtain licensure faster upon entering Colorado if they have three years of teaching experience. Currently, these teachers must have three years of experience within the past seven years.

Elsewhere in the state, new degree programs similar to PPSC’s have been recently approved or are currently in development at Pueblo Community College, Morgan Community College and the Community College of Aurora.

State-funded initiatives to fill educator shortages include its Educator Recruitment and Retention program, which provides financial aid to incoming teachers filling identified shortage areas, and its Teacher Recruitment and Education Preparation program, which covers tuition costs for the first two years towards an education career.

“So, I think, overall, we’re seeing more availability of prep programs, though I wouldn’t say that was a key factor in the shortage to start with,” she said. “It’s just that that pressure of the shortage means that we’re producing some more programs as well.”

Learning on the job

While the passion remains, the newest crop of teachers already know the work is not cut out for everybody.

“There’s a lot more that they kinda don’t tell you about or teach you about and I kind of see why,” said Fatima Stansell, a third-year kindergarten teacher at Adams Elementary.

She pointed to the low starting pay and likely needing to handle greater behavioral issues with students in Title 1 schools like hers as components of the job that may deter incoming teachers. Johnson said that finding a proper work-life balance during her first year was among her biggest challenges, noting all the time spent in meetings and class preparation beyond the teaching itself.

Another post-COVID phenomenon in public education has been heightened public debate and parent concerns about what’s being taught and discussed in classrooms between teachers and students, such as what’s considered diversity, equity and inclusion.  

For teachers like Stansell, she said this was a factor that led her to teaching. She, a Black woman, explained that she noticed a disproportionately small number of African American teachers compared to her community’s Black students.

“So, I wanted to kind of get into equity,” she said.

Because she teaches a class of much younger students, she said that she hasn’t experienced much of the more contentious issues that have garnered nationwide headlines post-COVID, but that she has witnessed teachers in the older grades grapple with this and that she’s ensured that her students have access to literature that better represents them.