The school year is well underway, but 3500 teacher, administrator and staff positions remain vacant in schools across the state today.

The Kentucky Department of Education presented findings about those shortages from a recent state wide survey.

Our June LaFleur has more.

The Kentucky Department of Education surveyed every school district and found that only one was fully staffed as of September 1st.

And we select a September 1st because there's you've done all your efforts.

Try to make sure you have all the positions in place before school has started.

So by September 1st, you more than likely that this is what you're looking at for a long period of time.

Hopefully will be field.

Districts say they need 1200 more teachers.

They also need 1700 more bus drivers, teacher aides and other classified staff.

So as of September 1st, we're still looking at 354 elementary school teachers.

Now, please don't think that there's an open classroom.

We're going to talk to you a little bit about how districts are taking care of that.

When you look at all these openings you have, most of them are utilizing substitute teachers while others are utilizing retired teachers, then also to increasing class size.

We've talked to some administrators themselves that are covering classes themselves and teaching classes.

Kudos to the administrators that are taking that on, too, because being an administrator is tough enough, but also to teach classes is phenomenal.

And also you have the reducing or eliminating teacher planning.

That happens a lot, especially when you have absences.

There's a lot of times when that teacher planning is is utilized because we need to have make sure students are covered.

But also to this is another mitigation strategy that's being used by districts to compensate for all those missing teachers that we have in the classroom.

Those fixes aren't ideal, says a former educator representing parts of Bullitt and Jefferson Counties.

The planning period being used.

What's the expectation for that teacher who has to give a planning period?

When is he or she expected to then plan?

Because I feel like that's an essential part of the job.

So I have I have real problem with that being given up.

In some cases, you know, some districts will say that's part of the the workday and your planning can be done afterwards.

Hopefully there's some opportunities for compensation to happen.

But again, that's handled differently in different districts.

The best opportunity is to make sure that we don't take that planning period away from teachers.

That's what I would promote.

But then you also balance with how do you make sure that those those students are supervised.

But again, there's no easy answer for that one.

Those 3500 vacancies are up for grabs.

Some might have already been filled.

But the survey also found that last school year, more than 1500 vacancies were never filled by the last day of school.

For Kentucky Edition, I'm Jean Leffler.

Thank you, June.

Those vacancies are listed online at Education dot K-Y dot gov slash jobs.