Six years ago, Kevin Mills approached the North Platte Public Schools superintendent with a problem: seven empty classrooms, no candidates. His pitch was unconventional.
“We’re not going to be able to fill seven positions,” the district’s human resources director said. “Can I start to recruit internationally?”
Today, North Platte employs four teachers from the Philippines, and Mills fields regular calls from other Nebraska districts wanting to know how he did it.
"We had to come up with creative ways," Mills said. "And we still do."
In the 2023-24 school year, North Platte reported having six teaching positions without a single qualified candidate. They left all six empty. Two years later, they still had six positions without qualified candidates. This time, they filled every one.
The classrooms are staffed, but the shortage hasn’t gone away.
North Platte's approach is a window into the mechanism behind Nebraska's reported progress on teacher vacancies. The number of unfilled positions — those left vacant or staffed by someone not fully qualified — fell statewide from 669 in 2023-24 to about 490 in 2025-26, according to the Nebraska Department of Education.
But a Nebraska News Service analysis of NDE data shows that the share of those unfilled positions left completely vacant fell primarily in districts in small urban counties — places like North Platte, Lexington and Norfolk. Districts in these counties aggressively turned to alternative certifications, provisional permits, international visas, paraprofessional pipelines and other creative tactics.
The gains are real. But they are uneven — and the districts and positions that posed the biggest challenge three years ago remain the hardest to staff now.
Questionable counting
Educators and administrators like Mills have watched candidate pools shrink for more than a decade, a trend that played out nationally as interest in teaching among high school and college students fell to historic lows. Nebraska felt it acutely: unfilled teaching positions in the state climbed from fewer than 250 in the 2020-21 school year to a peak of more than 900 in 2023-24.
The numbers have improved since. But the improvement might not be as dramatic as state reports show.
When NDE calculates the number of unfilled positions left completely vacant, it counts all unfilled positions in any category that has at least one truly vacant slot. So if a district had 18 unfilled math positions and staffed 15 with provisionally licensed teachers, leaving three vacant, NDE logged all 18 as vacant.
NDE reported the share of unfilled positions left vacant dropped from 30% in 2024-25 to 23% in 2025-26, or from about 201 positions to 111.
But a Nebraska News Service analysis of raw data found the problem is not as severe as the state reported — and the improvement is more modest. From the 2024-25 school year to 2025-26, the share of unfilled positions left vacant actually dropped from 18% to 16%, or from about 121 positions to roughly 79 statewide.
Jill Aurand, an IT office administrator with NDE’s Office of Data Management and Application Development, responded to a Nebraska News Service inquiry about the discrepancy and acknowledged NDE’s count is “not straightforward.”
“We are in the process of discussing potential changes to the report going forward to only use the count of positions not actually filled … but the current report remains the same,” Aurand wrote in a March 20 email.
The data may also mask a quieter kind of loss.
Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, said many districts simply stopped pursuing certain positions after teachers left, consolidating and eliminating programs rather than leaving slots visibly vacant. His home district — Millard in the Omaha area — phased out its middle school French and German programs because administrators found only one person in the entire state pursuing secondary French certification.
“That’s not listed as vacant because that program no longer exists,” Royers said.
He estimated hundreds of positions statewide have similarly disappeared from the data.
Empty classrooms
When a position is left vacant, the consequences ripple outward, according to Norfolk Public Schools director of human resources Angela Baumann.
A vacant high school science position may mean the course simply doesn't run. Students lose elective choices, class sizes in adjacent sections swell and the teachers left covering the gap often absorb the extra load.
"It could limit class size if we decide to combine some classes since we don’t have that teacher,” she said. “If it's a special education teacher, it's going to affect our caseloads and the number of students whose (Individualized Education Programs) they oversee."
So districts are doing everything they can to avoid empty classrooms.
According to a Nebraska News Service analysis of NDE’s Teacher Shortage Survey responses, small urban counties cut their share of unfilled positions left vacant nearly in half from 2024-25 to 2025-26. Rural and large urban counties, as groups, saw no improvement.
But the small urban districts didn’t benefit from an influx of qualified teachers. Rather, they sought to fill classrooms without them.
"We always want someone who's endorsed in the right area and has completed their teacher education program," Baumann said. "But if we can't find someone, then we look … at those alternative methods."
Royers said the state teachers’ union draws a firm line on where those alternative methods are acceptable. For secondary teachers, content expertise can partially substitute for traditional preparation. But at the elementary level, it shifts — younger students are still learning how to read and think critically, skills they’ll need before content knowledge becomes the priority.
“We really strongly feel that any pathway to elementary (teaching) needs to either be the traditional route or as close to the traditional route as possible,” Royers said, “because there's just so much that goes into teaching in that age that no amount of life experience … is going to be equivalent or tangible to that.”
Getting creative
The math in Lexington tells the story plainly.
Heading into the 2025-26 school year, Lexington Public Schools in Dawson County had 17 unfilled positions out of 51 total openings. After attending regional job fairs with limited results, administrators in the small urban district filled the gaps by hiring nine educators on provisional permits, staffing six positions with teachers lacking endorsements in those subjects, applying for two NDE waivers and bringing in three international teachers, according to the district’s comments and reports to the NDE survey. Lexington reported zero positions left vacant.
In North Platte, Mills, the HR director, has spent roughly six years building his own infrastructure. His international pipeline started when he noticed a Filipino teacher working in Julesburg, Colorado, just across the Nebraska border, and started researching. Eventually, he found a recruiting company that would send him applications to review.
“Since then, we’ve kind of become the experts,” Mills said.
He now has four Filipino teachers on J-1 cultural visas. He's built a para-to-teacher pipeline with colleges providing educator preparation programs and a separate track starting with high school seniors. He said he’s put roughly 10 non-educators into alternative certification programs with three more in the works.
“As long as they have a bachelor’s degree, and we have a job, we can hire them,” Mills said. “And then they start into that program under the alternative certification, which is a two-year renewable certification.”
The pipelines extend in unexpected directions. Four years ago, Mills noticed a preschool custodian with a personality for teaching. He moved her into a school secretary role and is now converting her into a teaching candidate.
“It’s that creativeness of going virtual … international hiring, pipelines for paras to teachers, pipelines for teachers to principals, and pipelines for high school seniors into paras and then eventually (to) teachers as well,” Mills said. “So it’s having all those pipelines set up, ready to go.”
But North Platte and other small urban counties are also spread thin. Some subjects at North Platte are covered by a patchwork of teachers paid extra to teach during planning periods, Mills said. Three years ago, North Platte shifted all dual credit high school classes over to Mid-Plains Community College, and in the 2024-25 school year, they had to fill a position with a long-term substitute teacher.
“It’s not really a great model, but … it’s what we were left with,” Mills said.
He also knows the limits of recruiting. Unless a candidate has some tie to Lincoln County — family, relationships, a reason to stay — retention becomes a problem almost immediately, he said.
"I have found that unless they have a connection here, you hire them for one year," Mills said.
To address retention, Mills extended the district's mentorship program from one year to two, reasoning that the first year is often too overwhelming to absorb much.
Mills also credits the district's professional learning communities — weekly collaborative sessions where teachers work together by grade level or subject — with driving down resignations.
The reliance on nontraditional teachers, though, does come with costs. Often, those fall on veteran colleagues.
Royers said union educators are increasingly asked to mentor non-traditionally certified hires — observing their classrooms, coaching them, providing the support that classroom management experience requires — while still carrying a full teaching load themselves. When districts carve out a dedicated planning period for that mentoring work, NSEA supports the arrangement, he said. When they don’t dedicate time, resentment builds.
Explore this searchable database to learn how your local school district filled positions from 2023 to 2026.
What the state did to make it possible
That kind of improvisation — leaning hard on every available pathway — became easier in large part because of changes the Nebraska Legislature and Department of Education made as unfilled positions peaked.
In June 2023, Gov. Jim Pillen signed LB 705, dubbed the Nebraska Teacher Recruitment and Retention Act. The law established $2,500 retention grants for teachers in their second, fourth and sixth years of service, along with one-time $5,000 recruitment bonuses for teachers who earned endorsements in high-need areas like special education, math, science and technology.
But not everyone feels those benefits equally. Veteran teachers have grown increasingly frustrated that state policy has focused almost entirely on early-career educators, according to Royers.
“The very strong pushback that we’re getting from our veteran educators is … there’s a growing sense that there is an overemphasis on helping out the early-career folks and that they’ve been kind of left to the wind,” Royers said.
He noted that thousands of Nebraskans hold valid teaching certificates but are not actively teaching.
NSEA backed a bill in the recently completed session, LB 411, that would have restructured the grants to cover every teacher — $2,500 in years one through six, $3,000 in years seven through 15, and $4,000 beyond that — to incentivize staying in the profession. The bill had broad support from union members across the state, Royers said. It also carried a $95 million price tag and died in a session defined by a half-billion-dollar state budget shortfall.
Some districts have found lower-cost answers. Millard Public Schools moved spring break from March to April, eliminating a nine-week stretch without a break late in the school year, and ensured at least one teacher work day every month. After making those and other calendar changes, Royers said the district saw resignations and retirements drop from roughly 120 in the prior year to about 60. Millard also shortened the elementary school day by 15 minutes — not for teachers to leave early, but so staff had time at the end of the day to file behavior reports, email parents and catch up on planning without taking work home.
"When districts have addressed the issue of time," Royers said, "we've seen a profound improvement in our ability to retain educators."
In 2023, the state launched Teach in Nebraska Today — originally a student loan repayment program that later converted to unrestricted $5,000 grants paid directly to teachers. A recent NDE evaluation found that 82% of participating teachers said the program influenced their decision to continue teaching in Nebraska.
Also in 2023, Nebraska joined the Interstate Teacher Mobility Compact, which allows teachers certified in other states to transfer their licenses to Nebraska without going back to school.
Ryan Escamilla, director of recruitment and supervisor of secondary personnel at Lincoln Public Schools, said Nebraska previously put itself at a disadvantage by making out-of-state certification transfers difficult.
"NDE has actually done a terrific job of allowing us to match what other states around us are doing so we are no longer competing with other states for certified teachers," Escamilla said.
NDE and the State Board of Education also eliminated the requirement that new teachers pass a Praxis exam — a subject test that new graduates previously had to pass before beginning their careers. Teachers can still use the Praxis as a faster path to add endorsements in additional subjects without returning to school.
“Eliminating the content area test for teachers who have completed their educator preparation program removes having that one single test from being the one thing that could potentially keep a great teacher out of the profession,” said Shirley Vargas, school transformation officer and administrator with NDE’s Office of Coordinated School and District Support.
In November 2024, NDE launched the Nebraska Teacher Apprenticeship Program, letting school employees earn a teaching degree and certification at no cost while drawing a salary. The program graduated its first 12 teachers in August 2025, with nearly 180 more expected by 2027.
NSEA has proposed taking that apprenticeship model further to qualified content experts who just need some training as a teacher. Royers recalled how a theater professor with a master’s degree and two decades of experience wanted to teach at the high school level, but needed 18 credit hours to qualify.
"That's the prime example of where an alternate pathway makes sense," Royers said.
NSEA worked with Republican Sen. Kathleen Kauth of Omaha on an interim study last summer examining whether the apprenticeship model could be expanded for candidates like that. Under the expanded model, a district would take on the training, using teachers who hold master's degrees to deliver the equivalent of undergraduate coursework. The candidate would spend roughly a year and a half in a paid, structured student-teaching experience before receiving a provisional certificate, followed by a monitoring window before full certification.
Not all alternate paths have earned that support.
Royers singled out a pathway created by the Legislature in 2023 through LB 603, later consolidated with LB 705, introduced by the Republican former state Sen. Lou Ann Linehan, who represented western Douglas County’s District 39 until 2025. The pathway allows candidates to obtain a teaching certificate through a national program called iTeach — advertised as achievable in as few as eight weeks, with no student teaching, practicum or classroom observation required.
"I don't even know how you would properly prep in two months to be a teacher," Royers said. "You're not setting that person up for success."
For Royers, the question of whether an alternate pathway is viable comes down to a single test: does it require hands-on training by master educators, or does it simply require passing a test?
"That's the clear litmus test," he said.
Statewide, the number of vacant positions barely budged in rural counties, and their use of alternatively qualified teachers fell. In the survey comments, many districts in rural Nebraska described a candidate desert where even creative strategies provided little relief.
Sioux County Schools in the northwest corner of the Nebraska Panhandle attended job fairs in Nebraska, South Dakota and Colorado, received one application for two open positions and left the other vacant. The applicant was local to the county.
"We spent a lot of money for no results!" the district wrote in NDE’s 2025-26 Teacher Shortage Survey.
Creek Valley Schools, near the Colorado border in the Panhandle, offered signing bonuses and salary schedule advancement for two positions and received zero applications.
Wakefield Public Schools, near the Winnebago Reservation in northeast Nebraska, summed up its situation in four words: "There are no applicants."
Even the rural districts that filled positions describe it less as a strategy than as luck. Crofton Community Schools in northeast Nebraska covered a high school math vacancy by splitting it between two retired teachers — one for fall, one for spring.
"We got lucky," the district wrote.
St. Mary’s Schools, a Catholic school in north central Nebraska’s rural Holt County, had just one applicant for its open position.
“Thankfully, he has worked out great for us,” the school wrote, “but we were in a position where we had to take him whether he had a good interview or not.”
Some described turning to international recruiting, and some said they left positions vacant because the only other option was international hiring — something they were unwilling to do.
Western rural counties face a dilemma not every rural area has: geographic isolation.
"What are the opportunities that a teacher, especially a young teacher, can have if they go there?” said Brad Paul, a former union carpenter who teaches industrial technology on a career education services permit at Tekamah-Herman.
Paul said Tekamah’s location — less than an hour outside both Omaha and Sioux City — has worked to its advantage.
When second-grade teacher Brynn Schmidt stepped into her classroom at Tekamah-Herman last August, she was technically still a student at Wayne State College. A months-long coordination between the district, Wayne State and NDE allowed the school to hire her as a full-time, salaried educator on a conditional permit — getting paid while completing her student teaching and filling a position that likely would have otherwise been left vacant.
"I love my job, and I love the kids," Schmidt said. "And I think I have a great support system around me."
It was the first time the rural district had ever hired a student teacher into a full-time position, according to the Tekamah-Herman's survey comment.
Rural counties often struggle to compete with larger districts that can afford to pay their student teachers, Royers said.
Districts like Omaha and Lincoln Public Schools in large urban counties have also felt the teacher shortage. But they have deeper candidate pools, stronger brand recognition, proximity to universities and large cities, and the resources to build longer pipelines to combat it.
Omaha Public Schools has run its own paraeducator pathway since 2012, funding classroom aides to earn teaching degrees in exchange for a commitment to stay with the district, according to Brandi Rossman, OPS human resources administrator.
Its Teacher Scholars Academy pays for high school students' four-year education degrees through the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The program’s first graduate started teaching in fall 2025 and 17 more are currently student teaching, Rossman said.
Lincoln Public Schools holds signing ceremonies for high school students who express interest in becoming teachers, staying in contact with them throughout college and hoping to recruit them back into LPS classrooms years later, according to Escamilla, the district’s recruitment director.
"It used to be that candidates would come to us ... Now we really have to go to them," he said.
Both districts have invested heavily in retention. LPS added stipends for hard-to-fill roles and holds a full week of orientation for new teachers before the school year begins. OPS hired an employee navigator to support staff through challenges at work or at home, and tracks exit survey data to identify trends.
"The more we can keep the staff that we have, the less we have to replace," Rossman said.
Some of the hardest positions to fill aren’t getting any easier. Special education had 140 unfilled positions in 2025-26 — the highest of any endorsement, barely down from 149 the previous year — even as the share of Nebraska students identified with disability needs has grown every year since 2020.
For speech-language pathologists and school psychologists, the alternative pathways that helped elsewhere don't apply: both require master's degrees, cutting off provisional permits and alternative certification as options, explained Baumann, Norfolk Public Schools’ human resources director. And in fields where candidates can earn significantly more outside schools — math, science, technology and the clinician roles — districts are competing on salary against employers they can't match.
What comes next
Nebraska has set an ambitious target. NDE's five-year strategic plan aims to cut unfilled positions in half by 2030 — from 669 to 334.5. With unfilled positions now at 489.7, the state has already passed the midpoint with four years to go.
But Vargas cautioned that being halfway to a goal after one year doesn't guarantee the pace will hold. The districts and positions that improved most quickly were the ones with the most tools available to them.
What remains are the hardest cases — rural districts with no applicant pool, special education roles that burn through teachers faster than they can be replaced, subjects where schools simply cannot compete with private sector salaries.
One population that doesn’t appear in the vacancy data at all is Nebraskans who have active teaching certificates but aren’t in a classroom.
Royers said NSEA has long pushed NDE to actively engage these former educators — people who left, often due to burnout, but whose licenses remain valid.
“They can literally take a job right now,” Royers said.
While some are recent retirees, many others left mid-career for private sector jobs that paid more or offered a better work-life balance. Royers argued that reaching them could add to the supply without building new pipelines from scratch.
Royers also pointed to one trend he finds encouraging. NDE tracks enrollment and completion rates in teacher preparation programs at Nebraska colleges and universities, and the numbers have been improving. After years of historic lows in interest in teaching among college students, the pipeline is showing early signs of recovery — a shift Royers connects partly to a decline in public attacks on educators that made the profession feel hostile to prospective teachers.
Royers said the sentiment was consistent whether he was talking to burned-out veterans or college students considering the profession: the relentless accusations of grooming and indoctrination had made the job feel like a target.
"As those attacks have diminished, that's opened up the space for folks to want to pursue the profession again," he said.
Royers flagged another trend he said rarely surfaces in vacancy data. Jobs for America's Graduates Nebraska, a workforce development program run through United Way of the Midlands, provides career preparation instructors who are not district employees. In a handful of small rural districts, Royers said administrators have begun assigning JAG instructors to cover other courses — gym classes, for instance — that have nothing to do with the program's mission.
"They're not even an employee of the district," Royers said. "And it's either incredibly cheap or that person is there at no cost to the district."
He views it as an early signal of a broader drift: districts using whoever is available and affordable rather than confronting the conditions pushing teachers out.
An increasing number of districts, including Fremont and Elkhorn, have begun contracting with outside staffing agencies to fill teaching positions on a temporary basis. The teachers placed this way are not district employees, are paid less than their colleagues and are often contractually barred from being hired directly by the district afterward. At least one of the agencies operating in Nebraska is a Maryland-based company with a background in medical staffing, he said.
The non-compete clause troubles Royers most. A district that fills a special education vacancy through an agency in July may find that teacher reassigned to another district by the following summer, with no ability to bring them back directly.
“It just takes the autonomy and the decision-making away,” Royers said. “It’s no longer about what’s the best fit for the teacher and for the students. It’s now about the bottom line of an out-of-state company just trying to make a profit off of a teacher shortage.”
For Royers, the test of whether Nebraska's progress is real or illusory comes down to a simple question: are districts putting a qualified, supported educator in front of students, or just filling a seat?
"We can't let it become … a stopgap that ignores the rot underneath," he said. "We need to actually pay attention to the root cause of what’s going on."
Tekamah-Herman Superintendent Brad Kjar said the state has done about as much as it responsibly can through certification flexibility.
"I'm not sure that there could be a whole lot more that we should do without lessening the qualifications so much that it would be detrimental to the profession," he said.
Escamilla drew the same line.
"We don't want to lower standards for our teachers," he said. "There's no way we want to put an unskillful person in the classroom, but we need to find a way to attract individuals that are skilled in areas to become teachers."