As with other disrupted portions of our economy, teacher employment is lower than what’s needed in New Mexico by a notable margin. One of the possible available solutions for teacher shortages is to deploy more online tools where students can do work from home at least part of the time.
Having alternate days for school attendance has been instituted in the past so that one school resource can serve twice as many students. This might well stretch the available teachers far enough to survive the current teacher shortfalls.
NMSU study finds New Mexico teacher vacancies doubled in one year
But the months of pandemic education have not been long enough to solve the affordable quality internet access problem, which enables learning from home. Maybe the teacher shortage will focus efforts to expand access to where it should be.
So far, it seems like that access is going to be slow in coming, and perhaps take a number of years, at best. This despite a reputable recent survey that shows parents and students are more comfortable today with a greater % of LFH in the blended learning equation.
We have also seen reports of how parents are desperate to have children back in schools/ out of the house because, for one thing, daycare is harder to find and notably more expensive currently. Others say that the current implementations of learning from home have been far from adequate, at least for some students.
2021-New-Mexico-Educator-Vacancy-Report