Kindergarden teacher Latris Sykes helps secnd grader Shiakia Hayes during family literacy night at Lincoln Park Primary School in Pensacola, Fl. Thursday, April 23, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Pensacola Today)

School districts in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties hired 567 new teachers for the 2015-2016 school year.

Mirroring national trends, public schools in the Pensacola metro struggled to find teachers in hard-to-fill areas such as special education, math and science — in sharp contrast to a flooded market of teachers looking for jobs just a few years ago.

“The teacher drought affected us in specialty areas,” said Tim Wyrosdick, Santa Rosa schools superintendent. “We aren’t seeing as many applicants.”

Equally challenging was recruiting and hiring teachers classified as minorities, which is a catchall phrase for nonwhite.

Of the 321 new hires in Escambia County, 67 teachers, or 20.8 percent, were minorities. In Santa Rosa, seven teachers, or 3 percent, were nonwhite new hires.

Escambia schools Superintendent Malcolm Thomas said it’s always been hard to find teachers of color, and this school year was no different.

“There are more avenues now that are attracting minority candidates,” Thomas said. “And let’s face it, being a teacher hasn’t been the most glamorous job in the last couple of years.”

The minority teacher shortage, research suggests, is a contributing factor to the minority achievement gap and, ultimately, unequal occupational and life outcomes for disadvantaged students.

While the nation’s graduation rate, including that of black and Latino males, has continued to rise, the gap between black males and their while peers has grown, according to a recent report released by the Schott Foundation for Public Education.

‘Look like America’

For several decades, shortages of minority teachers have been a big issue for the nation’s schools. Policy makers and political leaders have agreed that our elementary and secondary teaching force “should look like America.”

But the conventional wisdom is that as the nation’s population and students have grown more diverse, the teaching force has done the opposite—grown more white and less diverse.

The result is that minority students in schools increasingly lack minority adult role models, contact with teachers who understand their racial and cultural background, and too often qualified teachers of any background, because white teachers avoid schools with large percentages of minorities.

People of color represent a third of the U.S. population and 40 percent of students in U.S. public schools, according to U.S. Census and Department of Education data. But they represent only 17 percent of teachers.

Most teachers in the U.S. — more than 80 percent — are white, and surveys suggest that won’t change in the near future.

The numbers of teachers in Escambia County nearly mirrors the national average, as 82.6 percent of 2,408 teachers are white. And nearly half — 49.8 percent — of students in Escambia County are nonwhite.

Of 1,871 teachers in Santa Rosa — 95.5 percent — are white.

Thomas said while diversity among educators has merit, it’s a lot more important to have someone who is qualified in his or her subject area.

“If I can find a qualified, certified chemistry teacher or a high school calculus teacher, I really don’t care what race they are,” Thomas said. “When we’re hiring, not only are we looking for the racial diversity, we’re looking for specific qualifications.”

The importance of recruiting and retaining more teachers of color for students of color, however, is well-reported and deeply researched.

An article last month in the Atlantic, “Why Schools Need More Teachers of Color — for White Students,” suggests that nonwhite teachers can offer new and valuable perspectives for children of all backgrounds.

“Studies show that, academically, nonwhite teachers produce more favorable outcomes for students of similar backgrounds; emotionally and socially, these educators serve as role models who share students’ racial and ethnic identity,” Melinda D. Anderson wrote in The Atlantic. “What has gotten much attention, however, are the potential gains for white students.”

Call for action

The call for more teachers of color has grown more urgent in recent years because of changing demographics in many public schools.

In an increasingly multiracial, multicultural society, some education experts question the impact on white students’ worldviews when the face of teaching almost mirrors their own.

A big hurdle school districts face is the lack of minority candidates in the hiring pool. Teaching is no longer as appealing or rewarding as it used to be and fewer minority students enter and complete college. Those students who do finish college have an increasing number of career and employment options aside from teaching in fields like computer science, medicine and engineering.

“Look at the percentage of students in the college of education, there’s not enough,” Thomas said. “It’s about having people who are accessible to hire.”

Wyrosdick echoed Thomas’ lament about the lack of people interested in becoming teachers.

“Young people just aren’t going into education,” he said. “There are so many more opportunities than what we had.”

The litany of reasons that compound frustrations in education is growing, including the ongoing debate about and confusion over the Common Core State Standards, high-stakes testing and efforts to link test results to teacher evaluations.

Toss in the removal of tenure protections and a variety of recession-induced budget cuts, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

In today’s society, young people can make more money than teachers with less stress and strain, Thomas said.

In Escambia County, first-year teachers earn $35,872 per year. The district also offers $2,500 to $3,600 in additional pay for advanced degrees.

Among ACT-tested graduates in 2014 who said they planned on pursuing an education major, 72 percent were white, compared to 56 percent of tested students.

Moreover, when minority candidates do seek to enter teaching, they encounter barriers—in particular, teaching entry tests, on which minority candidates have lower pass rates, exacerbating the minority teacher shortage.

National search

But having racial and ethnic diverse teachers can provide many benefits to schools, students and other teachers, experts say.

In planning curriculum, having people of different backgrounds can create opportunities to develop more inclusive classroom units.

Teachers who are racial and ethnic minorities may also understand the behavior, actions or attitudes of students who also are minorities; though it is important to note that teachers who are white can also express such cultural sensitivity.

There is growing evidence of the power to being what you see, meaning that students sees a teacher who looks like them, it latently shows them what might be possible in their own lives.

Like Thomas in Escambia County, Wyrosdick said this year Santa Rosa County expanded its search for new teachers nationwide. They found teachers willing to relocate from as far as Wisconsin and Washington State to start a new career in the Sunshine State.

“We hired some amazing teachers from all over the United States,” Wyrosdick said.

Recruiting and hiring minority teachers continues to be a challenge, and both school districts won’t abandon efforts to find qualified candidates to reflect the student population. But Thomas said he’s not going to lose any sleep over the dilemma.

“I’m not going to stay awake at night if the teaching population doesn’t mirror the student population by race,” Thomas said. “I would stay up a lot more at night if I have a vacancy for some core content areas and have to hire a sub because I can’t find anybody that knows how to teach that subject to students.