Virgin Islands DOE Students and Staff Continue to Leave En Masse

The Virgin Islands Department of Education (DOE) reports that 189 teachers and support staff in the Territory have submitted retirement and resignation letters as of August 15th just weeks removed from the start of the new school year.

During a budget presentation to the 34th Legislature’s Committee on Finance on August 16th, representatives from the DOE told lawmakers that the 99 teachers and support staff on St. Thomas-St. John and 90 from the St. Croix district had filed to either retire or resign from their positions.

According to testimony from Dionne Wells-Hedrington, Commissioner nominee for the DOE, the department currently employs a total of 833 teachers and support staff in the STT-STJ district and 851 in the STX district. While staffing shortages have been a major theme of the Senate’s budget season, the sheer numbers shocked lawmakers.

“That’s like a crisis to be honest with you,” said a distressed Senator Marvin A. Blyden, who would later say. “We need to make sure that you know, we have the proper amount of staff to assist in their learning.”

The Commissioner nominee, who only assumed her position on August 3rd, noted that the DOE had tapped its substitute pool and attempted further recruitment efforts.

“So we do have the substitute pool available and we are aggressively contacting those individuals who we know have supported the department in previous years to come back and help us at least to get over the hump,” said Commissioner Nominee Wells-Hedrington.

Lawmakers encouraged the DOE to explore retention programs as utilized in other branches of the government, given that staffing shortfalls have become thematic in many budget presentations and overviews of departmental functions.

During her research of the DOE’s budget request, Senator Alma Francis Heyliger noted that 17% of teachers would be eligible to retire and asked what, if any, retention programs were utilized by the DOE to keep teachers employed past the minimum age of retirement.

“Hey, sometimes money will keep them there on the job,” said Sen. Francis Heyliger. “That’s a large section of our educators that might be ready to walk through the door.”

The DOE noted that it hopes to attract recent retirees to return to their lecterns under a law that allows them to work while still collecting their retirement funds.

“The law allows for retirees to retire and continue to get their annuity and work and that's something that we're going to embark on,” said Victor Somme III, with the Human Resources Division of the DOE. “So we want to begin to attract those individuals to say: ‘hey, you can get your annuity and stay on.’”

During the budget presentation to the Senate’s Committee on Finance on August 16th, the DOE requested an appropriation, based on the Governor’s recommendation, of $177.2 million; Personnel costs represent the largest portion of the DOE’s overall budget request at 67%. The Governor’s budget request includes $919.4 million from the general fund.

Meanwhile, enrollment in the Territory’s public school system continues to decline at similarly alarming rates to that of its teachers and support staff. Since the 2011-2012 school year, enrollment has declined by almost 35% according to figures provided by the DOE, but it should be noted, and certainly not understated, that the overall population had decreased by 18.1% from the 2020 census.

Yet this served as little relief to lawmakers who appear to grapple with an emigration problem which is counterintuitive to the renewed sense of economic optimism overall in the Territory. Chairman of the Committee on Finance, Senator Kurt A. Vialet said the DOE appeared to have enough money, but urged better decision-making in the process.