In a just a few years, school districts have gone from handing out pink slips to scrambling to hire teachers.

Across the country, districts are struggling with shortages of teachers — a result of the layoffs of the recession years combined with an improving economy in which fewer people are training to be teachers.

So schools are looking for applicants everywhere they can — whether in state or around the country — and wooing candidates earlier and quicker.

Escambia County is among school districts already in search of new teachers to fill openings for the coming school year.

A Teacher Fair on Saturday at Booker T. Washington High School aims to make it easier for teachers to find work in Escambia County schools.

“It’s an opportunity for recent graduates and current teachers in other states to find out what it takes to become eligible to work for us,” said Elizabeth Oakes, Escambia’s director of personnel services. “This is a great community and school district that all together makes this a wonderful place to get hired.”

A team of recruiters is visiting colleges in search of qualified candidates and urging them to attend the Teacher Fair to learn about job opportunities in the county. The primary purpose of the fair this year is to provide information on how to become a full-time or substitute teacher.

“Nationally, there is a teacher shortage, and we’re experiencing some of those pains,” Oakes said. “We’re fortunate that we have been able to start the school year just about fully staffed.”

Oakes said the district typically has 200 to 400 job openings each school. Escambia hired 321 new teachers for the 2015-2016 school year.

Retirement, non-renewal of contracts, people moving away and normal attrition leave job openings for the district to fill each year, she said.

The estimated attrition rates in teaching is said to be as high as 30 percent in the first three years. The truth is, there are no exact numbers. With so many teachers employed casually upon graduation, there is no data on how many of them just give up on the profession. They simply disappear — and there is no exit interview to find out what prompted them to leave.

While it’s hard to say why teachers leave their field, a few reasons that keep coming up are the perceived lack of respect for the work they do and the low salaries they earn.

In Escambia County, first-year teachers with a bachelor’s degree earn $36,446 per year. The district also offers $2,500 to $3,600 in additional pay for advanced degrees and experience.

Salary increases may prove to be an important tool in stabilizing the teaching force in the short term by sending the message to educators that the time and energy they sacrifice for their jobs aren’t being taken for granted.

A number of states want to raise their salaries, but it’s unclear whether the increases will do much to solve schools’ staffing problems, according to a report in The Atlantic magazine last week.

In “What If American Teachers Made More Money,” Alia Wong writes:

As districts in certain parts of the country battle staffing shortages and schools nationwide seek to overcome general sense of dissatisfaction among faculty, several states are considering proposals to pay their public-school teachers more money. The average public-school teacher salary in the United States in the 2012-13 academic year (latest data available) was $56,000, versus roughly $69,000 for nurses and $83,000 for programmers. Experts say raising that threshold could help improve the profession’s lackluster reputation and encourage more high-achieving college students to pursue the career—especially in less-than-desirable schools and districts.

Wong referred to the Metlife survey, which found that roughly two in three public-school teachers felt their salaries weren’t fair for the work they do, and chances are that percentage has only grown as a result of new classroom reforms, including high-stakes evaluation systems, that some argue have placed excessive burdens on educators.

A number of studies—including one on a program in North Carolina that offered a bonus of $1,800 to only math, science, and special-education teachers working in struggling public schools—have shown that modest salary increases can help stem turnover. But it’s hard to say whether such proposals will have long-lasting impact on the general teacher shortage.

Surveys suggest that although teachers’ job satisfaction has declined significantly in recent years, their perceptions about pay have hardly changed; factors beyond money contribute to the recruitment-and-turnover problems.

The challenge is finding new teachers who are qualified, competent and dedicated to the profession. Achieving this goal, researchers say, is complicated — something that few extra hundred, or even thousand, dollars alone won’t solve.

In Escambia County, Oakes said, the School District promotes the value of location near the beaches and the wholesome appeal of a caring community.

“When you come to Escambia County, you don’t just get a job; you get a whole community,” Oakes said. “We’re very imbedded into our community, we’re very much a part of it, and our community is a part of who we are.”