Educator shortage is a critical issue; it impacts almost every aspect of the education system in Washington. Spanning diverse content areas, geographic regions, and educator roles, shortage is complex and cannot be summed up with a single set of data points.
For the lists on this page, the overall shortage definition includes educators with a limited certificate in a certain content area plus educators assigned out-of-endorsement in that same content area. Detailed information regarding calculations for these data sets is found in the technical definition for quantitative shortage.
To better understand shortage across educator roles and regions, specific maps display distinct sets of data.
Regional shortage areas
State shortage areas
This is the list of shortage areas statewide in descending order by the amount of shortage FTE.
- Elementary Education (inclusive of early childhood education)
- Special Education (inclusive of Early Childhood Special Education)
- CTE – Technology Education
- Health/Fitness
- School nurse
- Mathematics (inclusive of middle level math)
- English Language Arts
- School speech language pathologist and audiologist
- CTE – Business and Marketing Education
- School counselor
- Science (inclusive of middle level science and designated sciences)
- Social Studies
- Spanish
- School psychologist
- Music
- Visual Arts
- CTE – Family and Consumer Sciences
- History
- CTE – Agricultural Education
- Reading
- ELL/Bilingual Education
- Computer Science
These shortage lists may be used in the following:
- Alternative Routes Block Grant
- Educator workforce programs
- Educator retooling conditional scholarship program
- Pipeline for paraeducators conditional scholarship program
- Teacher shortage conditional scholarship program
- Alternative routes conditional scholarship program
- Career and Technical Education Conditional Scholarship Program
- Student loan repayment in exchange for educator service for certain federal loans
- Educator preparation program approval and review
PESB recognizes that local shortages exist that may not be captured within the quantitative definition. PESB allows local designation of shortage according to the process used for defining qualitative shortage (document).
View 2019 shortage areas (document).
View 2020 shortage areas (document).
