A report issued in July by the Utah Foundation stated that teachers are increasingly leaving their careers in both the U.S. and in Utah. This, coupled with a decline in the number of college students studying to become teachers, is leading to a teacher shortage.

The report also indicated that Utah schools are particularly vulnerable to teacher shortage now, because the student population is growing rapidly and will continue to do so through the year 2015.

Mary Tuttle is an associate dean at the McKay School of Education at BYU. She indicated that there are many reasons for the teacher shortage.

"One of the reasons of the shortage in Utah is because we have larger families, and our student population is growing," Tuttle said. "We also have a lot of immigrants moving in."

Another reason Tuttle gave for the shortage was fewer students at the universities who are choosing to be teachers. She said when Utah was at a high with the numbers of teachers trained, about 1,200 teachers graduated a year. Now that number is between 700 and 800.

Tuttle said that many students who study education in Utah are going to teach in other states because they pay better than Utah.

"Contrary to previous years, many more teaches in the last year or two, indicate they will go elsewhere to teach because they can make a better living," Tuttle said. "We should bring the teachers salary up to be more comparable to other states."

Tuttle said one result of the shortage is having teachers in the classrooms who do not have a teaching degree.

"Right now we have many teachers in Utah who do not have teaching degrees because they don't have enough teachers for the classrooms," Tuttle said. "We hire people who want to be teachers on letters of authorization, which is a situation where we put somebody in the classroom and they take their training in an evening school or in other ways."

Tuttle said putting teachers in classrooms who do not have training or a teaching license, hurts the quality of education, especially with special education.

"In Alpine school district for example, they have 30 special education teachers with letters of authorization," Tuttle said. "This is because there weren't enough teachers to hire."

In offering possible solutions to the situation, Tuttle said one of the untapped resources would be teachers who once had a license but stopped teaching to have a family.

"One of the things we could do is find ways to make it easier and more attractive for people who left teaching to come back and renew their licenses," Tuttle said. "It is hard for most of them to come back because of the difficult process they have to go through to renew their license."

Mary D. Burbank, clinical associate professor and director of secondary education at the University of Utah said they have implemented a few programs in partnership with Salt Lake Community College to recruit more teachers into their program.

"We are working collaboratively with Salt Lake Community College to increase the number of potential recruits starting community college," Burbank said. "We have a new program here at the College of Education that allows for a series of courses at the Salt Lake Community College that would transfer to the University of Utah thereby decreasing the amount of time a student may potentially spend getting a degree and a license."

Burbank referred to teaching as a lifelong opportunity to be of help to others.

"Teaching is an opportunity to continue as lifelong learners to make a difference in the life of young people, " Burbank said. "To enter into a field that is very exciting, working with colleagues that have the same spirit is a really invigorating way to spend your life."

Stephen Kroes, Utah Foundation president, said a mentoring and induction program would also help expand Utah's effort to retain new teachers. He said such programs have been shown to significantly reduce the quickly declining number of new teachers.