ANNAPOLIS — Maryland public schools opened this fall with far fewer empty classrooms than four years ago, state education officials say.
Teacher vacancies statewide fell from 2,145 in the 2022-23 school year to 572 this school year, a drop of 73.3%, the Maryland State Department of Education announced Oct. 19. The department called the decline historic. The biggest one-year drop, 45.3%, came between 2024-25 and 2025-26.
Fewer vacancies mean fewer classes covered by long-term substitutes and fewer students shuffled between teachers mid-year. Elementary education vacancies, which affect the youngest students, fell 63.3% over the same four years. Maryland’s public schools employ more than 64,000 educators.
State Superintendent Dr. Carey M. Wright, State Board of Education President Dr. Joshua L. Michael and Gov. Wes Moore made the announcement at Hillsmere Elementary School in Annapolis, joined by Anne Arundel County Superintendent Dr. Mark Bedell. The Governor’s Office issued a companion release.
Anne Arundel offered the most dramatic local example. Its vacancies fell from 283 in 2022, Bedell’s first year, to 16 on the first day of this school year, according to the department. A first-grade teacher at Hillsmere, Elaine Griffith, spoke about her own path into the classroom.
What the state credits
The department tied the decline to higher teacher salaries, recruitment and retention efforts, and programs that train people already working in schools to become licensed teachers. Among them:
- Grow Your Own Educators grants, which have gone to 16 school districts and total $33.7 million
- A registered teaching apprenticeship program, whose first cohort enrolled this year in Caroline, Charles, Dorchester, Washington and Worcester counties
- TEACH Maryland, an online recruitment platform for aspiring educators
- A $1 million Teacher Quality and Diversity Grant program to strengthen and diversify teacher preparation
- The Excellence in Maryland Public Schools Act, signed by Moore this year, which aims to expand debt-free paths to full teacher licensure
Southern Maryland’s stake
The department’s announcement did not break out vacancy numbers for Calvert, Charles or St. Mary’s counties, and statewide gains do not necessarily mean every district saw the same decline.
Charles and St. Mary’s are tapping the programs the state credits. Charles County Public Schools is in the apprenticeship program’s first cohort. In August, the state’s second round of Grow Your Own grants sent about $3 million to St. Mary’s County Public Schools and about $1.5 million to Charles, which plans to use its share to move 75 conditionally certified teachers through tuition-free licensure, as the Chronicle reported in Southern Maryland Schools Get $4.5M Teacher Grants. An earlier round of awards was covered in Moore Awards $19M to Grow Local Teachers.
Grow Your Own participants generally commit to teaching full time for at least three years in a high-needs school or subject in the district that sponsors them, so the payoff for local classrooms should show up over the next several school years.
Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s school systems had not released their own fall vacancy counts alongside the state announcement.
