For this school year, there are more than 370 teachers working in Warren County School District.

About 15 percent of them do not have teaching certificates for the subjects they are teaching.

According to the latest information provided by the district, there are 59 professional staff who are emergency certified. The majority of those are full-time teachers, but part-time teachers, administrators, psychologists, special education supervisors, and others can also work with emergency certificates.

School board members have expressed concerns about the number of people with such certificates teaching students. They admit that there’s no guarantee that a teacher with an emergency certification won’t be great and similarly no assurance that a teacher with a certificate will. But, they expect that odds lean in favor of the certificated teacher being generally better than the teacher with an emergency certificate.

“The candidate for an emergency permit must have earned a bachelor’s degree from a state-approved college or university and must meet all other eligibility requirements,” according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

A teacher who has an emergency certification does not have a teaching certificate for the class they are teaching. Teachers with emergency certifications who opt to return for a second year must progress toward earning the appropriate teaching certificates.

The prevalence of emergency certifications is a sign of a larger problem.

“There is a lack of teachers. There is a lack of substitutes,” Superintendent Amy Stewart said. “It’s one of the number one problems that we have. It is a problem across the nation.”

According to administrators, in years past, the district would receive 100 or more applications for every open position. Over time – mostly in the last 10 years – that number decreased. Now, there are sometimes no fully-qualified applications for positions.

According to the Pennsylvania School Board Association’s State of Education report, staffing shortages were the biggest challenge facing Pennsylvania school districts in 2022.

The number of applicants for elementary positions was the last to hold strong, but even those have dried up.

Elementary education core subjects and early childhood education core subjects are among the U.S. Department of Education’s long list of specializations with shortages.

Essentially every education specialty is on that list.