Arlington With 'Fewer Than 68' Teacher Vacancies Ahead Of School Year

ARLINGTON, VA — Arlington Public Schools has "fewer than 68" full-time teacher openings to fill before the new school year starts on Aug. 28, putting the school system ahead of where it typically is at this time of the year, according to Superintendent Francisco Durán.

At Thursday's Arlington School Board meeting, Duran said the school system is about 97.5-percent staffed with licensed teachers and that its human resources department is working to fill the remaining vacancies through recruitment events.

Arlington Public Schools is currently at a better place with teacher staffing than it has been in previous years, Durán said at the Aug. 3 Arlington School Board meeting.

“I’m encouraged with the progress [and] that we’re in a better place at this point than we had been in in previous years, particularly given the situation nationally and even in our region with regard to very, very high vacancies,” he said

About a year ago, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive directive aimed at addressing a shortage of teachers in the state. When he signed the executive directive, Youngkin cited a 10-percent salary increase for teachers in Virginia that was included in the state’s fiscal year 2023 budget that he signed into law in June 2022.

At Thursday's school board meeting, Durán also said that APS is beginning to roll out its new ParentSquare communications platform, which will replace School Messenger, Talking Points and other texting and email platforms that the school system had used.

Parents will receive login information to ParentSquare next week, and teachers will be trained on the system when they report back to school in mid-August. At the school board meeting, Durán noted that the ParentSquare platform was created by parents and has been adopted by school systems across the country.

The ParentSquare platform will allow parents to receive messages from school via email, text, or mobile app. They will get to choose to receive information instantly or in a daily digest.

The ParentSquare platform, which translates messages into more than 100 languages, also will allow a message sent out by APS in English to get translated into the parents' preferred language. The system also will allow a parent to write a message in their language, and it will get translated into English when it is sent to APS.