Black Hills State University tackling teacher shortage with annual teacher fair

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KEVN) - Across the nation schools are struggling to retain and hire teachers, over at Black Hills State University officials are looking to alleviate the issue with their annual teacher fair.

Every year Black Hills State University hosts a teacher fair to assist their education majors in finding a job after they graduate. With a teacher shortage affecting not only the Black Hills but the entire country, many of the schools at the event came with incentives to apply.

“So for us, we are out here promoting our school district and one thing that has really hit in rural areas which is really kind of hard to recoup is the lack of housing in these rural school districts and now we are coming back to the table with our school district and we have housing now,” said Anne Eagle Bull representing Oglala Lakota County School District.

“We provide housing for our staff, because the location, housing is limited in Eagle Butte so we do provide the housing,” said Amy Bochman a teacher at Windswept Academy.

“Yeah we’re trying to be competitive with our pay obviously and then we have some teacher housing that we’re trying to use as availability for people to come into our community and have that available to them,” said Darren Luebbe a Principal in Hot Springs District #1.

While most of the districts we spoke with are using housing as an incentive to get applicants, Rapid City Area Schools has a unique approach to the problem, offering paid student-teacher positions.

“Typically you pay to do your student teaching so it’s nice to kind of flip that and be able to make some money because you are doing all of that work and you kinda get a jump start on your career so it’s a great place to do that,” said Jennifer Roberts the principal of Rapid City Alternative Academy.

It can be easy to consider only Western South Dakota when considering events like this but schools from all over were included at the event.

“Now’s kinda the opportunity to see what opportunities exist and not just from the Black Hills but beyond we have some from East River, we have one from Michigan, we have one from California, Nevada, and even Alaska,” said Jin Kim the Career Development Director at Black Hills State University.

Kim says this is beneficial because many of the students at BHSU came from out of state and many may be looking for jobs closer to home.

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