In San Jose, where classes began last week, dozens of teaching posts were vacant all summer in East Union High School District, especially in high-demand fields such as special education, math, science and speech therapy. A significant portion of the district’s 27,000 students are likely to end up being taught by job candidates who would normally be rejected because they lacked proper credentials.

Districts can use waivers of minimum requirements in emergencies. According to a San Jose Mercury-News report, the number of teachers given temporary credentials in California schools went from under 5,000 in the 2012-13 school year to 9,900 in 2015-16, the last year for which complete figures are available. That’s nearly two-thirds of the regular teacher certifications issued during the same period – a sharp change from previous eras.

Districts with deep-pockets in wealthy Silicon Valley communities have mostly been able to fill positions. But Oakland Unified has been unable to fill vacancies for special education teachers despite offering $1,000 bonuses to new hires, and has struggled to fill other teacher vacancies as well.

A San Francisco Chronicle report detailed 10 other area districts with teacher openings. San Francisco Unified had the most with 61.

District wants to be housing developer, landlord

The severity of the problem is causing districts to consider ideas that once would have seemed unlikely for a public school system. In Alameda Unified, a proposal to have the district act as the developer and then the landlord of a 70-unit apartment complex for district employees with moderate salaries has won initial OKs. It was developed after an employee survey showed nearly one in five were considering quitting and moving because of the cost of housing.

In San Mateo County, it is county officials taking the lead.

Using $5 million in county seed money, the San Mateo County Housing Endowment and Regional Trust nonprofit plans to begin offering loans to local school districts to help them build housing that teachers can afford. The funds come from a half-cent county sales tax approved by voters last fall to help deal with housing issues.

Skeptics who note the average cost of a San Mateo County home is $1.2 million and the average starting pay of teachers is $50,000 question how much help the county grant will really bring. But some local government officeholders say it’s just the start of ambitious efforts to address a worsening crisis.

In the Legislature, the same dynamic holds for Assembly Bill 45 by Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, a Democrat from the Bay Area town of Richmond. It would establish a $25 million state program providing grants to qualified districts to help build housing for district employees, as well as provide loans up to $10 million to developers to build affordable shelter for district employees. With affordable housing units costing at least $300,000 in most urban areas, critics say Thurmond’s proposal wouldn’t change the status quo of the region’s housing crisis.

But like the San Mateo County program, it has its fans – including one far from the Bay Area. Riverside County school Superintendent Judy White told the Southern California News Group she thinks Richmond’s proposal can help “eliminate or minimize housing as a barrier to bringing qualified teachers to our area, that will help us fill needed positions.”

White believes AB45 could be a good vehicle to create her concept of “teacher villages” in Riverside County. Her proposal was the topic of a flattering March story in USA Today.

AB45 passed the Assembly in May and has won approval from two Senate committees, with all votes mostly along party lines.

San Francisco and San Mateo counties in the Bay Area have passed a grim milestone reflecting extreme housing costs: The federal government now considers households in the counties which make $100,000 a year to be “low income,” making them eligible for federal housing programs for poor families, most notably Section 8 vouchers that allow

The specific income threshold for the two counties is $105,350 – less than the $115,300 median annual household income of those counties. Strikingly, however, the poverty threshold in the two counties is nearly 90 percent higher than the Census Bureau’s most recent estimate of median U.S. household income ($56,516) and more than 60 percent higher than $64,500, the census estimate of median California household income.

The threshold in the adjacent counties of Santa Clara, Alameda and Contra Costa is between $80,000 and $85,000.

While the change makes more San Francisco and San Mateo households eligible for subsidies, it is unlikely to provide much relief to anyone any time soon. Section 8 vouchers are rationed because of limited federal funding and there are long waits – sometimes decades-long – to qualify in counties across America, especially in high-cost urban areas.

A recent San Jose Mercury-News report on the Housing and Urban Development income-threshold change offered it as hard evidence of the housing affordability crisis that threatens to drive in-demand public school teachers away from the Bay Area and Silicon Valley and toward school districts with similar pay but rents that average much less than the $2,500-plus a month seen in such communities as San Jose, Oakland and Pleasanton.

The report outlined the frustration felt by Demetrio Gonzalez, a Richmond educator with a master’s degree in education who works for the West Contra Costa Unified School District. Gonzalez, who makes $48,000 a year, says he has no choice but to share a house with four roommates.

“With this income, I don’t think it is possible to create a future in the place I love and the place I work,” he told a Mercury-News reporter. “When I decide to buy a home — if possible — I’ll have to look elsewhere.”

Housing costs exacerbate Bay Area teacher shortage

Such stories add a new dimension to reports of teacher shortages throughout the Golden State. Three-quarters of California school districts reported struggling to fill vacancies entering the 2016 school year, according to a report from the California School Boards Association and the Learning Policy Institute. This has led to an unparalleled used of technically unqualified teachers in state public schools, especially in math, science and special education.

During the 2015-16 school year, the report said the state authorized 10,200 teachers without the normal baseline credentials to teach various subjects – more than double the number seen in 2012-13.

But the struggle to fill teacher positions appears far more daunting in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley than the rest of the state. The California Teachers Association described San Francisco as “ground zero” for the state’s teacher shortage.

Last year, to improve teacher retention and to entice new teachers, many districts in the region used a private-sector tactic and supplemented pay with one-time bonuses. The most generous was San Jose Unified: All teachers on the payroll on the first day of the 2016-17 school year who met very basic requirements for coming to work got a check equal to 7 percent of their total annual salary.

Mayor Ed Lee and the San Francisco Unified School District announced Wednesday they plan to build a 100-unit housing complex solely for public school teachers and paraprofessionals, and invest up to $44 million over the next five years to help them purchase homes.

 

The proposals seek to help the many teachers and teaching assistants in San Francisco who say untenable housing prices have made it impossible for them to live in the city.

 

“Providing this housing opportunity for our teachers is one of the most important things we can do as a city,” Board of Supervisors President London Breed said in the mayor’s office Wednesday. She added that she was “really a bad kid in school” and the teachers who helped children like her “deserve an opportunity to live in this great city.”

 

The plan for a teachers-only housing complex is in its nascent stages. City and school officials said it will be constructed on property already owned by the school district, although they wouldn’t identify what sites are under consideration. They also haven’t determined who would qualify for the housing.

In May, Los Angeles Unified announced similar plans. This is from the LA Weekly:

The Los Angeles Unified School District [has a] 66-unit, four-story Selma Community Workforce Housing Project under construction at North Cherokee and Selma avenues in Hollywood and is scheduled to open in fall of 2016, the district says. It’s “intended for L.A. Unified employees who fall into a designated economic category. The complex is part of the District’s ambitious effort to attract and retain staff who want to live near work but can’t afford to pay for housing costs.”

Gov. Davis won tax break for teachers

This isn’t the first time that teachers in California have been singled out for special treatment. In 200o, Gov. Gray Davis sought to exempt teachers from the state income tax, a proposal that quickly faced strong opposition. He ended up signing a far more modest measure that gave teachers a tax credit of up to $1,500 for out-of-pocket classroom expenses.

Given that the average teacher pay in California is nearly $70,000, it seems possible that opposition could build to singling out a group with middle-class pay for special treatment in a state in which 23 percent of residents are in poverty. But San Francisco officials sought to blunt such concerns by framing the policy as being crucial to attract and retain teachers.