The crux of school district leaders’ work in attracting and retaining talent on their staff—especially principals and classroom teachers—is listening to what they want to accomplish in their professions, and what they want from their working environments.
The ability to understand educators’ career aspirations and the support they need, in fact, can in some contexts be just as important as compensation.
That’s one of the core messages that K-12 administrators intend to deliver at this week’s National Conference on Education, hosted by AASA, the School Superintendents Association, in Nashville. Strategies for recruiting and retaining talent, and developing a leadership pipeline, are major areas of interest for district leaders around the country.
Staffing turnover is a perennial concern in many school systems. About 7 in 10 early career teachers leave or consider leaving the profession within their first five years of working, according to a 2025 Center for American Progress survey.
Specific types of teacher roles are especially hard to fill. In a survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center late last year, 66% of K-12 officials said that it’s very difficult to recruit special education teachers, the highest of any classroom-focused job category the respondents were asked about.
The next-most difficult teaching position to fill was teachers of English as a second language (47%). Just 11% of respondents, by comparison, said it was very difficult to fill elementary teaching positions. The nationally representative online survey was conducted of 270 K-12 officials who are responsible for or influence recruitment.
Poor working conditions, lack of support, and low pay are among the top reasons educators want to leave or have left the profession, reports CAP. However, there are a number of factors that could convince educators to stay: smaller class sizes, greater autonomy, and more prep time are among them, according to recent Education Week reporting.
“Getting paid livable wages and being able to support a family is certainly critical, but I do think it’s more than just money,” said Debbie Jones, superintendent of Bentonville Schools in Bentonville, Ark., who is scheduled to serve on a recruitment-and-retention-focused panel called “The People Principle,” at the AASA event.
“They need to feel a part of something—like their opinion matters, that their superiors listen to them, and they need to build value.”
Focus on culture during lean financial times
The ability to show recruits that a school system is committed to building and maintaining a positive culture brings many benefits, especially when district budgets are constrained financially, said Corey Grubbs, the chief of transformation and leadership at Columbus City Schools in Columbus, Ohio. To do that, it’s important to create a work environment in which staff are celebrated and feel heard, he said.
Grubbs leads different programs in the Columbus district focused on retention and recruitment of school principals. Establishing a pipeline that leads from the classroom to the front offices of schools is critically important, said the Ohio school official, who is scheduled to appear on the AASA panel on talent recruitment and retention.
“We lose principals and assistant principals,” he told Education Week, “and so we are always looking at the amazing teachers, leadership potential, leadership capacity, encouraging them to apply.”
One of his district’s programs prepares educators for their work as school principals. Once they move into those school leadership roles, a mentoring program puts first- and second-year principals and assistant principals into cohorts where they can learn and receive peer support.
The Peoria Public Schools in Peoria, Ill., faced hurdles with teacher retention, but it has made improvements in that area, said Superintendent Sharon Desmoulin-Kherat. In 2015, the district had 108 teacher openings, but in 2025 it had only 13.5 job openings.
“We focused less on short-term recruitment fixes and more on creating conditions that encourage educators to stay,” Desmoulin-Kherat told Education Week. “That included stabilizing our district finances, addressing longstanding vacancies, investing in facilities, students, and support staff.”
The district sought to improve compensation by offering retention bonuses to staff and focusing on improving workplace conditions. It has also sought to build a collaborative relationship with a local teachers’ union. The results is that teacher retention has risen from 78% in 2015 to 88% in 2023, said Desmoulin-Khera.
Some strategies go a “long way and do not cost a lot of money,” she said. Among them: “restoring hope, strengthening trust, and creating opportunities for individuals goes a long way.”
‘Be innovative,’ says a district leader
Different districts need to have different approaches to recruit and retain educators, and it starts with asking staff what kinds of support would benefit them, said Jones. Her district’s executive director of human resources has sought to collect that information by launching an alumni club and talking to retired teachers about what they would have wanted while working.
Based on those conversations, the district opened a child care center for staff in the district’s elementary school, and it moved to create more affordable housing for teachers.
In partnership with Accelerate Foundation, the district built 40 homes for teachers, staff, and other residents of the Bentonville school district over the past three years. Teachers can rent a two-bedroom home for about $1,000 per month, or they can pay about $1,500 a month to be a part of a shared equity plan, in which they will receive about $50,000 in equity after five years.
“Accelerate Foundation is focused on trying to get families on the pathway to home ownership,” Jones said.
In the Cobb County school system in Georgia, one strategy that administrators say is working is helping teachers to get an advanced degree for free, said Jasmine Kullar, the district’s chief school leadership officer.
“The business world has been doing this for a long time—you get hired by a company, they’ll pay for your MBA,” said Kullar, who is also expected to serve on the AASA panel. “Education has never done that, so we’ve been offering this to our administrators and teachers.”
The incentive program, known as Georgia’s BEST, launched two years ago in partnership with the University of West Georgia. The program requires educators to stay with the district for at least three years to participate. Many educators have cited this program as the reason they are applying to work in the Cobb County schools, said Kullar.
Cobb County Schools also offers a New Teacher Academy, and in past years, many of the teachers participating in the program were “straight out of college,” said Kullar. But over time, with the creation of Georgia’s BEST, the New Teacher Academy is now made up mostly of “veteran teachers in other districts that are coming to our district.”
The district has worked with the university to create majors in areas in which more teachers are needed, like special education and instructional technology, said Kullar.
“Georgia’s BEST was definitely one of the best recruitment retention strategies for our district,” she told Education Week.
