Lawrence school district teachers participate in a professional development seminar at Langston Hughes elementary school in this file photo from Oct. 17, 2012.

Kansas may face a teacher shortage in coming years.

Fewer Kansas college students are majoring in education, shrinking the supply of certified teachers to replace those who are retiring and resigning, according to a report issued this week by a Kansas State Board of Education task force.

“That gives us the most concern,” Ken Weaver, dean of The Teacher’s College at Emporia State University and co-chair of the task force, said in a news release.

For now, though, unfilled teacher vacancies are confined to specific districts, and the Lawrence school district continues to fare well in the teacher hiring market.

In the Lawrence district, 118 certified teachers left their positions last school year, about one-third of whom retired. That number is consistent with years past, and the district has already filled a large part of those vacancies, according to David Cunningham, the district’s executive director of human resources and legal services.

“While we know that on a statewide basis things are slowing down — there are not as many people going into education and some people are getting out,” Cunningham said. “… We’re pretty fortunate. We’ve been able to find quality teachers.”

This is the first time that the state board of education has tracked the supply and demand of teachers statewide. The report says that about 2,800 Kansas teachers left the profession last year, about 40 percent of whom retired.

In the meantime, the report says the most recent data available shows the number of students choosing to major in education has decreased significantly. From 2011 to 2014, the number of education majors in public and private colleges in Kansas decreased 31 percent, from about 7,750 to 5,400. The number of teaching degrees completed dropped 16 percent during that time, from about 2,270 to 1,900.

Those numbers didn’t seem to affect hiring in Lawrence for this year. Cunningham said that of the 118 certified teaching positions vacated last school year, the district has already made 93 new hires to date. All elementary positions are filled, and only about 5 classroom positions remain open at the secondary level, he said. In addition, some traditionally hard-to-fill positions in special education also remain open.

“We’re feeling the pinch, I suppose, just like everybody else, in the context of when you have fewer people in education, the whole pool of people in the market place is a little bit lower,” Cunningham said. “But we’re not having trouble hiring people.”

That the Lawrence district continues to fill its positions despite the decreasing supply also follows statewide trends. The report says that rural districts and high-poverty urban districts, such as Wichita and Kansas City, have the hardest time hiring teachers. Of the approximately 275 unfilled vacancies in the state last school year, many were clustered in those regions.

The task force did not have data indicating the reasons that teachers are resigning, but noted that some factors included low salaries, low esteem for the profession and instability of state funding.

The starting salary for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree in Lawrence is $37,730 for the upcoming school year. A teacher’s salary increases with additional years of service and education, and the average teacher salary for the district in 2015 was $54,207, according to Kansas State Department of Education databases.

Cunningham said the district also doesn’t have empirical data indicating why teachers resign.

“We don’t necessarily know how many people are saying, ‘You know, I just don’t want to work in education at all,’ Cunningham said. “We don’t really track that kind of exit data.”

The task force, which includes educators and state board members, recommended that the board create a committee to report annually on the supply and demand of teachers. It also recommended that school districts develop incentives, such as hiring bonuses and additional steps in pay scales, to recruit and retain teachers.

Cunningham acknowledged that even for districts such as Lawrence that tend to draw a steady number of applicants, the statewide trends are important to watch.

“The fact is, as the total number of people going into education decreases and you have more and more people retire over time, at some juncture, one would theorize everybody is going to struggle hiring people,” Cunningham said.