Preschool plan plagued by Hawaii’s teacher shortage

Momentum is growing for Hawaii’s plan to create statewide access to preschool — but so are anxieties over how quality teachers for 465 new classrooms would be found amid a pervasive teacher shortage, as well as how private preschool providers would be able to attract more workers with higher salaries without pricing out tuition-paying families.

Already, some of the state’s largest private preschool providers report running at only around 65% capacity, keeping waitlists of student applicants and leaving some classrooms empty because they can’t hire enough qualified teachers at current pay and benefits.

“It is just not OK anymore that you can make more money at an ABC store as an employee than working at many of our preschools. It’s just not pono,” Terry George, president and CEO of the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation and co-chair of the education task force of the Hawaii Business Roundtable, said during a gathering of 14 education experts and community leaders Thursday at Kuhio Elementary School.

That salaries across all parts of the early- childhood industry urgently need improvement to help ease the teacher shortage was a prevailing theme during the roundtable discussion hosted by U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono, who announced Tuesday that she is running for reelection, and Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, who is spearheading the state’s Ready Keiki plan for universal preschool access.

The Ready Keiki plan is a “mixed delivery” system of private and public preschools that aims to make early education accessible to all Hawaii children ages 3 and 4 by 2032.

With a little over half of Hawaii’s 35,272 children in those age groups already being served in prekindergarten classrooms, mostly at private licensed providers, the state is investing $200 million in creating 465 new and renovated public classrooms in increments by 2032 for the islands’ estimated 9,297 children who are currently “underserved.” Strategies include outfitting existing classrooms at public schools, charter schools and libraries, and building several hundred new modular buildings, popularly known as portables.

The plan also calls for an increase to Preschool Open Doors state subsidies that qualifying families can use at private preschools; Luke is pushing for it to grow to $50 million from the current $12 million.

The lieutenant governor said she’s confident about filling the first 11 classrooms expected to newly open in August. But full and stable staffing of hundreds of classrooms for the long term requires systemic improvements in pay, benefits, training and the hiring pipeline, and respect for the profession, roundtable participants agreed.

The annual mean wage for Hawaii preschool teachers with an associate’s degree ranges from $38,140 to $55,960, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hawaii child care workers with a high school diploma or equivalent earn $25,720 to $29,710 on average.

As the state hires public preschool teachers with bachelor’s degrees, meanwhile, they will be covered by the collective bargaining agreement between the state and the Hawaii State Teachers Association. The average salary of a Hawaii public school teacher in grades K-12 in 2020-2021 was $70,922, according to National Education Association data.

But as negotiators are starting talks on the next contract, the union has said that it’s not enough given Hawaii’s high cost of living and the fact that public schools continue to operate with hundreds of vacancies — more than 700, or about 6% of the total positions, according to the state Department of Education.

The National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the country, estimated at the start of the school year that the U.S. is short about 300,000 teachers and support staff, and called the situation a “five-alarm crisis.”

“I challenge us to really think about not just living wages for our educators, but can we think about thriving wages for our educators,” said Wai‘ale‘ale Sarsona, vice president of Kameha­meha Schools’ Hi‘ialo Group, “so that they really see this as a place that they can make their careers, that they can make a difference for our kids and really live here and have a family here and thrive as a family here.”

She recalled a recent conversation with some college students in which she asked them why they are not becoming educators. “They said, ‘You look really tired. It doesn’t look like a desirable place to be.’ And that really stuck for me because if we don’t see our profession in early learning, and educators in general, as a thriving career, that is the response we’re going to get, and we are getting, from those that we hope will take on this responsibility.”

Christina Cox, president and CEO of KCAA Preschools of Hawaii, added that the COVID-19 pandemic spurred an “exodus from the field — not just people moving from here to the mainland, but also people opting for other industries.” She said that as the liaison for the Childcare Business Coalition, she has been told by member providers that enrollment has been down to 65% to 70% of pre-pandemic levels.

“As a group we have over 40 open teacher positions. We have 35 classrooms we cannot open because we have waitlists but we don’t have staff,” she said.

Private preschool providers are concerned about how they’ll be able to match the higher preschool salaries expected with the coming wave of public preschools without overly burdening families by passing on the costs via increased tuition.

At Seagull Schools, which has five preschools around Oahu, teachers start at about $19 an hour, which comes to just shy of $40,000 per year. But they tend to stay because the company works hard at making them feel valued, said CEO Megan McCorriston.

Between the shortage of teachers and pandemic-era inflation that has hurt both her company and her students’ families, enrollment has dropped to 700 children from about 1,000. The monthly tuition for ages 3 to 5 is $1,050.

“We have to raise salaries, there’s no way around that,” McCorriston said. “We’re trying to do that without the hit to families. The only way to do that in our world is to raise tuition rates, and Seagull has worked really hard not to do that. … It’s part of our mission to stay affordable.”

Hirono is one of the U.S. Senate backers of the proposed federal Child Care for Working Families Act, which she said would create a national child care infrastructure, make child care affordable for working families, expand access to preschool programs for 3- and 4-year-olds, improve the quality of care for all children and increase compensation and provide training for child care workers.

Luke said there is a “clear recognition by both the Legislature and many of the stakeholders” that teachers of all kinds are underpaid. But she noted the delicate balancing act involved in bringing about better pay for public preschool teachers while encouraging private providers to translate the government subsidies families use to pay tuition into competitive teacher pay — “a trickle-up effect, not just in the public side, but the private side as well,” Luke said. “Because if we don’t, we will just be … taking employees from the private side to the public side. And that’s not what we want to do.”

—

LEARN MORE

>> Find an overview of the Ready Keiki plan at 808ne.ws/readykeiki.