Perry County Schools Face Teacher Shortages, Leaders Detail Staffing Challenges

When Perry County Schools posts a teaching job, Jody Maggard knows the inbox will look nothing like it did a decade ago.

"Maybe there will be times that you post and you only get one or two applicants, whereas several years ago, it would have been 10 to 20 applications," said Maggard, the district's chief financial officer. That collapse in applicant volume, he said, has worsened steadily since the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2025 Kentucky Educator Shortage Survey put the scale of the problem in stark relief: more than 2,000 teacher vacancies across the commonwealth.

Perry County Schools officials raised those concerns as part of a regional conversation about the continuing teacher shortage affecting districts across Kentucky. Maggard described the district's most pressing staffing fear in blunt terms: a wave of simultaneous retirements.

"We're always looking at what if — what if all of them that can retire this year decides to retire. How will the Perry County Schools in Eastern Kentucky replace 35 teachers in one summer? And that would — that's the almost impossibility," Maggard said.

The scenario is not hypothetical for its own sake. District leadership is actively modeling retirement risk, aware that Eastern Kentucky's educator pipeline has thinned considerably and that competing for the smaller pool of applicants is increasingly difficult for rural districts.

One regional response to the pipeline problem comes from the University of Pikeville, where the Patton College of Education offers a Master of Arts in Teaching program designed for career-changers and others who already hold a bachelor's degree. Dr. Coletta Parsley, dean of the Patton College of Education, said the program bridges the gap between subject-matter knowledge and classroom readiness.

"They already have the content knowledge, obviously, from their bachelor's degree, but they have to develop the teaching skills, and that's what we give them in their practicum courses," Parsley said.

The MAT program represents one pathway toward rebuilding the educator pipeline in Perry County and surrounding districts, though how directly UPike coordinates placements with Perry County Schools was not detailed in the district's public remarks. With retirement scenarios looming and application numbers at a fraction of their pre-pandemic levels, Maggard's warnings suggest the district is navigating a staffing challenge with few easy solutions in sight.