25 Feb New Data Collection Shines Light on Broader School Staff Shortages

When we think of school staff, typically it is teachers that first come to mind. Other salient school staff include principals, cooks, custodians, and librarians. However, paraprofessionals – known also as instructional assistants or teacher’s aides – also form a significant part of the educational workforce.

Many of North Dakota’s teachers and principals will tell you how important paraprofessionals are to their schools’ operations. From supporting regular classroom instruction and special education, to monitoring lunch and recess, paraprofessionals help keep students on-track and their presence increases the safety of the students and staff. In that sense, both their presence and their absence are felt by everyone in the school environment.

North Dakota is experiencing workforce shortages across a variety of sectors, and education is no exception. While attention has been paid to teacher shortages – e.g., the 2024 Teacher Recruitment and Retention Task Force – school staff without teaching licenses have received less attention despite the challenge their shortages pose for North Dakota’s schools. Shortages of paraprofessionals, cooks, bus drivers, and other non-licensed personnel need a closer look.

Fortunately, through interagency collaboration, NDUS-IR has begun collecting data on the non-licensed school personnel shortage. By connecting North Dakota’s K-12 Education Coordination Council’s focus on staff shortages to school districts’ fall data reporting to the ND Department of Public Instruction, I launched the collection of non-licensed school staff shortages. This data collection, which began in fall 2024 and will continue each fall, is a first step in measuring the severity of non-licensed school staff shortages over time, and relative to teacher shortages.

Before launching data collection in fall 2024, the year prior I was leading members of the K-12 Education Coordination Council as we studied school personnel trends. Focusing on those school personnel who were employed in 2021-2022 anywhere in PK-12 education in North Dakota – 12,368.7 FTEs of teaching-licensed staff and 8,727.7 FTEs of non-licensed staff – we tracked their retention within the field of education in North Dakota into 2022-2023. The retention rate for teaching-licensed personnel was 90.2% while the retention rate for non-licensed personnel was merely 77.0%. When looking specifically at paraprofessionals, special education paraprofessionals were retained 71.7% of the time while all other paraprofessionals were retained 73.5% of the time.  It became apparent that focusing on all kinds of school personnel allowed for a better understanding of the workforce shortage facing schools.

These retention findings were enlightening, but the size of the shortage of paraprofessionals and other non-licensed personnel was still unclear. Anecdotes from North Dakota administrators and educators told us that the shortage was a problem, but to date, nobody had measured it. This is when we developed the plan to collect such data alongside the unfilled positions survey completed by school districts each fall. This annual survey had only ever focused on teaching-licensed personnel, so the addition of non-licensed personnel categories made the survey more comprehensive.

The fall 2024 unfilled positions survey results were eye-opening. Across public schools, non-public schools, and other student-serving entities, the reported teaching-licensed unfilled positions totaled 219.3 FTEs for teachers and 81.8 FTEs for other licensed personnel. These figures were somewhat similar to the prior year. Meanwhile, the newly reported non-licensed personnel unfilled positions totaled 212.0 FTEs for paraprofessionals and 154.8 FTEs for all others. Given that roughly 40% of educational staff are non-licensed personnel, it is striking that they account for 55% of shortage FTEs. Special education paraprofessionals were especially in short supply, with 167.9 unfilled FTEs.

This research and new data collection have transformed our understanding of the paraprofessional shortage from colleagues’ anecdotes, to documenting poor retention rates, to putting a number to the shortage of 212 FTEs. Importantly, the data point is only a snapshot from the fall, and so it cannot account for mid-year departures of paraprofessionals that result in additional unfilled FTEs. Although 212 FTEs is not comprehensive of the entire school year, it’s certainly more information than we had before. Now the shortage of paraprofessionals and other non-licensed personnel can be examined closely and tracked over time, allowing for data-driven decision-making among stakeholders and policy-makers who seek to address North Dakota’s school staff shortages.

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Dr. Ellie Shockley is an Educational Data Warehouse Specialist on the NDUS institutional researcher team. In this capacity, she also works closely with the Department of Public Instruction (PK-12) and the Information Technology Department. She often responds to education data requests that come from state agencies or from outside of state government. Her work ranges from pulling raw data and sharing it according to our best practices, to conducting complex statistical analyses in order to answer research questions, to assisting with inter-agency collaborations related to education data, and more.