Key takeaways
- Bismarck Public Schools reported shortages across nearly every category — teachers, bus drivers, custodians, food service, special education aides, school psychologists, and substitutes.
- Broad shortages are harder to absorb than deep ones: a district can cover one absent teacher internally, but not an unstaffed route, an unfilled aide position, and a vacant psychologist role at once.
- Roles carrying transferable credentials — CDL, clinical licensure, behavior certification — put districts in direct competition with faster-moving private employers.
- Districts recover by sourcing before the vacancy, clearing credentials early, and consolidating fragmented vendors into one pipeline that covers every role type.
In this article
In the fall of 2023, Bismarck Public Schools — North Dakota's largest district, serving more than 13,700 students across 27 schools — described a staffing problem that had stopped looking like a seasonal gap and started looking structural. District leaders said shortages had spread into almost every field, and that keeping the necessary positions filled had become a persistent struggle rather than an occasional scramble.
What made Bismarck worth paying attention to was not that a district had open roles. It was the shape of the shortage: it reached well past classroom teachers into the support roles that hold a school day together. That pattern has since become familiar to district leaders across the country, which is why this story is still instructive years later.
What Bismarck Was Actually Facing
Bismarck Public Schools reported shortages across teachers, bus drivers, custodians, and food service staff, plus specific difficulty filling special education aides, school psychologists, and substitute teachers. District leaders said the problem had persisted roughly 15 years in certain roles before broadening into nearly every category.
The detail that distinguishes Bismarck's situation from a generic "teacher shortage" headline is how far down the org chart it went. A district can absorb a single unfilled teaching position for a while. It cannot absorb simultaneous gaps in transportation, nutrition services, custodial work, special education aides, school psychologists, and the substitute pool — because those roles are what make it possible for teaching to happen at all.
Bus drivers were the hardest hit. As KFYR-TV reported at the time, Darin Scherr, the district's business and operations manager, pointed to the obvious pressure: a commercial driver's license is portable, and districts are, in his words, "competing with some higher paying jobs." That dynamic is not unique to North Dakota. Any role that carries a transferable credential — CDL, behavior analyst certification, clinical licensure — puts a school district in direct competition with private-sector employers who can move faster and pay more.
Why Support Roles Break First
Support roles break first because they combine low pay bands with credential requirements and near-zero slack. A district can cover one absent teacher internally; it cannot cover an unstaffed bus route, an unfilled one-on-one aide position, or a vacant psychologist role, because no one else on site is qualified or available to absorb the work.
There is also a compounding effect that rarely shows up in a vacancy count. When the substitute pool is thin, absent teachers get covered by pulling paraprofessionals out of their assigned classrooms. When paraprofessional roles are themselves unfilled, that coverage comes out of specialists, or out of a principal's day. Each of those moves is invisible on a staffing report and expensive in practice — and in special education, pulling an aide off an assigned student is not just an inconvenience but a potential service-delivery problem under that student's IEP.
School psychologists deserve particular mention. Bismarck named them among its hard-to-fill roles, and the position sits at a bottleneck: evaluations gate eligibility determinations, and eligibility determinations gate services. A vacancy there does not slow one classroom; it backs up the process for every student awaiting an evaluation.
What Actually Closes These Gaps
Districts close multi-role shortages by sourcing before the vacancy rather than after it, clearing credentials early instead of at the offer stage, and consolidating fragmented vendor relationships into one pipeline that covers every role type — including the support positions generalist agencies tend to treat as an afterthought.
Three things separate districts that recover from districts that stay in the cycle.
Sourcing has to start before the resignation. Reactive hiring guarantees you are recruiting against every other district at the same moment, for the same scarce candidates, with the same urgency. Building a warm, pre-cleared pool ahead of known turnover is the only version of this that scales.
Credentialing has to stop being the bottleneck. In most districts the slowest step between a good candidate and a staffed classroom is manual verification of licenses and clearances. Automated credentialing cuts that timeline roughly in half — which matters most for exactly the credentialed support roles Bismarck struggled with, since those are the candidates with the most competing offers.
Fragmented vendors make the problem worse. A district running four agencies for four role types gets four timelines, four vetting standards, and no one accountable for whether the building is actually staffed. At Odyssey Public Charter School in Wilmington, Delaware, FocusedEDU filled 120+ roles spanning 13+ distinct job types — certified and substitute teachers, SLPs, OTs and PTs, psychologists, reading specialists, one-on-one aides, paraprofessionals, bus drivers, and support staff — through a single pipeline, reaching a 95% day-to-day substitute fill rate, a 40%+ improvement over the school's previous provider. That role mix is close to the one Bismarck described, which is the point: the fix is not a better teacher pipeline, it is a pipeline that does not stop at teachers.
For Districts Reading This Now
Bismarck's 2023 situation was an early, clearly-reported example of something most districts have since encountered: a shortage that is broad rather than deep, and therefore not solvable by focusing on the highest-profile role. If your open-position list spans instruction, related services, and operations at the same time, the diagnosis is usually not that recruiting is underperforming in one category. It is that sourcing is reactive and credentialing is slow across all of them.
FocusedEDU was founded by a former K-12 teacher and works one client per region, so the pipeline built in your area is never handed to a neighboring district. If you are trying to staff across role types rather than fill a single seat, book a discovery call and we will start with your actual vacancy list.
