JEFFERSON CITY — As Missouri continues to navigate school personnel shortages, some lawmakers believe districts should be able to expand the usage of retired school employees during critical staffing shortages.
Schools across Missouri are finding ways to increase employee retention. As of 2024, 168 school districts across the state have shifted to a four-day school week. According to previous reporting, some of these districts do this to gain a competitive edge against surrounding districts.
Last year, Missouri passed a bill allowing the rehiring of retired public school teachers full-time for four years if in a critical shortage, in hopes of easing teaching shortages. Schools, however, are limited to rehiring less than 10% of non-certified staff, or five people in total.
In 2024, around 9% of public school courses in Missouri are taught by non-certified teachers, adding around 2,000 non-certified teachers on top of 2023’s numbers, according to data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
What the bill forgot, according to Rep. Aaron Crossley, D-Independence, are the other essential personnel still facing a shortage in Missouri schools.
House Bill 1722, sponsored by Crossley, allows the rehiring of non-certified school employees to cover said shortages. It also changes the amount of rehires to 1% of the total of certified teachers and non-certified staff.
At a committee hearing Tuesday, representatives from the Missouri State Teachers Association and Missouri Retired Teachers Association testified in support of the bill. No one at the hearing testified against it.
“Education is a team effort,” Crossley said. “Often people think of just funding teachers, which is really important, but we also need to make sure that we’re funding our non-certified staff.”
Crossley said the bill not only allows schools to fill much-needed positions but can also lighten the workload of certified teachers and staff. This means rehired employees could fill many different empty jobs.
“Our paraprofessionals, people that are taking care of kids with disabilities, people that are driving our kids to school every day on school buses,” Crossley said. “When a school district has a critical shortage of staff … they can fill those with seasoned, retired professionals.”
Crossley added how the bill gives retired teachers or employees the chance to earn extra money without risking their pension in the process.
“If they were to be rehired in a school district that hadn’t declared a critical shortage, they would lose their pension,” Crossley said. “This way they can go in, make more money, the school district has that position covered, and their pension is not affected.”
Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.
Error! There was an error processing your request.
While this is a solution to staffing shortages across the state, Crossley noted how it’s a temporary one, giving schools someone to fill the slot as they look for a permanent employee.
“Teachers, non-certified staff that are hired under a critical shortage can only be there for a certain amount of months,” Crossley said. “It’s not a forever kind of job. It’s really a temporary fix to a problem we will hopefully continue to address.”
In Crossley’s hometown, Lance Stout, deputy superintendent of operations for the Independence School District, has the current maximum of retired teachers hired.
“They fill positions for us that we were not able to fill,” Stout said. “It’s been a pretty seamless process, honestly.”
Staffing shortages hit Independence especially hard last year, Stout said. Last year’s law allowed the district to fill as many holes as they could. This year, he says he hopes this bill will allow him to cover positions the school needs, but can’t fill.
“Lots of vacancies every day, we didn’t have bus drivers come in, we just had a shortage,” Stout said. “That left our director, it left our mechanics, it left dispatchers having to leave their regular jobs to go drive buses.”
This year, Stout said the district is still feeling the pressure.
“We started with 10 open routes,” Stout said. “As of Monday, we have four.”
The lack of drivers available causes delays in getting to school, with Stout mentioning how the district sometimes had to start classes late.
“If we could bring in some retired bus drivers, they know routes,” Stout said. “That’s a huge learning curve.”
Stout said he’s hopeful the bill will pass through committee and eventually become law.
“This would allow us to hire up to 24 [rehired employees],” Stout said. “We’re very excited about that opportunity and we’ll take full advantage of it.”