School districts are responding to the nationwide teacher shortage by building planned housing programs to attract and retain educators.
One driver of the teacher shortage cited by superintendents is the lack of affordable housing for their staff to live close to where they work.California's Mountain View Whisman School District, in which the median home value is around $1.5 million, has constructed affordable subsidized housing for staff, and other communities have planned villages with amenities beyond housing.
The Bentonville area is home to massive and expanding companies such as Walmart, food processing company Tyson Foods, and trucking company J.B. Hunt Transport Services, and such growth has contributed to skyrocketing housing prices. Historically, her district has been able to hire 140 teachers per year with"highly competitive" salaries, but it has become much more difficult to fill positions, especially young teachers graduating college, she explained.
"Our goal is for a young starting-out teacher that has a household income of maybe $50,000 to $60,000 to actually be able to purchase a home and participate in the benefits of home ownership as far as equity appreciation, etc.," Webster added, explaining that he wants to help young people in the area be able to get on the"first step" of the"housing escalator."
"Just because it's never been our responsibility to seek affordable housing doesn't mean that it's not smart to do that as a school district because our major responsibility is to be able to hire the best, and if there are roadblocks that prevent us from doing that, then we have to take whatever means necessary to remove that roadblock," she said, explaining that housing prices are"increasingly" that roadblock.
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