Angela McKnight can tell how her daughter’s school day went before she asks a single question.
Some afternoons, 12-year-old Nia climbs into the car talking fast, about a science experiment, a book discussion, a teacher who made the whole class laugh. Other days, she drops her backpack on the floorboard, closes the door and says almost nothing.
Those are the days Angela already knows.
“Sub again?” she asks.
Nia nods.
Angela does not blame the substitute. She does not blame the principal. She does not even blame the teacher who left halfway through the year. But as a parent in Florence County, she has learned that a school can be open, a class can be covered, and a child can still be missing something important.
“That’s the part people don’t understand,” Angela said. “My daughter is in school. She has a desk. She has assignments. But some days I don’t know if she has a real teacher in front of her.”
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That is how South Carolina’s teacher shortage lands inside families. Not always as a dramatic collapse. More often, it arrives quietly: a long-term substitute, a rotating schedule, a combined class, a delayed email, a math concept a child says “nobody explained,” a special education meeting where everyone is trying but nobody has enough time.
Statewide, there is evidence of progress. Teacher vacancies are down. Departures are down. South Carolina has raised teacher pay. More schools received higher report-card ratings in 2025. But for parents, the question is not whether the numbers improved from the worst point.
The question is whether their child has a stable, qualified adult in the classroom tomorrow morning.
The shortage has improved. It has not disappeared.
South Carolina began the 2025-26 school year with 706.23 vacant educator positions, according to the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement, known as CERRA. That was down from 1,043 vacancies in 2024-25 and 1,613 in 2023-24.
That is real improvement. It also means hundreds of positions were still unfilled when the year began.
The vacancies were not evenly spread across the system. CERRA’s 2025-26 data tables showed 148.5 vacant special education teaching positions, more than any other teaching field. The state also reported 48 vacant science positions, 37 vacant math positions, 34 vacancies in other intervention-type roles, and 31.5 music vacancies.
The service shortages matter, too. South Carolina districts reported 68.13 vacant speech-language pathologist positions, 54.55 vacant school psychologist positions, 17 school librarian vacancies and 15 counselor vacancies.
For a parent, those are not job categories. They are services.
A speech-language pathologist is the person who helps a child make progress on an IEP. A school psychologist is the person who helps evaluate needs, manage crises and support learning plans. A librarian is the person who can turn a reluctant reader into a regular one. A counselor is the adult a student may finally trust.
Angela learned that during a meeting for her nephew, who receives special education support.
“Everybody at the table cared,” she said. “That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that everyone looked tired, and everybody had too many children attached to their name.”
The churn is part of the crisis
Vacancies are only one measure. Turnover is another.
CERRA reported 6,180 educator departures for 2025-26, down from 6,533 the year before and far below the 8,321 departures reported in 2022-23. But 6,180 departures still means thousands of students began the year with a new teacher, a new routine, a new classroom culture or no permanent teacher at all.
The early-career numbers are especially important. CERRA counted 2,113 early-career departures, meaning educators with five or fewer years of teaching experience. That is lower than in recent years, but it still shows the state losing many teachers before they have fully settled into the profession.
The system keeps hiring to keep up. Districts reported 6,462 new hires for 2025-26. But only 1,190 came from South Carolina traditional teacher education programs. Another 1,708 transferred from another South Carolina public school district, which may help one district while creating a vacancy in another. The state also reported 332 international hires.
Those numbers point to a system that is working hard to refill itself. But parents experience churn differently than administrators do. They do not see a staffing pipeline. They see their child learning how to adjust to another adult.
Nia’s math teacher left after winter break. The school sent a message. The class continued. The assignments continued. The grades continued. But Angela said something changed.
“She stopped asking questions,” Angela said. “That scared me more than the grade.”
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Student results show why stability matters
Teacher shortages would be serious even if students were already thriving. They are more serious because South Carolina, like many states, is still trying to recover from years of academic disruption.
On the 2025 SC READY assessment, South Carolina reported that 61.7% of third graders met or exceeded expectations in English language arts. By eighth grade, 55.7% met or exceeded expectations in English language arts.
Math was weaker. In 2025, 56.3% of third graders met or exceeded expectations in math. By sixth grade, that dropped to 39.4%. In seventh grade, it was 34%. In eighth grade, it was 32.4%.
The national test data tells a similar story. On the 2024 NAEP reading assessment, 32% of South Carolina fourth graders performed at or above proficient, while 60% performed at or above basic.
Those numbers do not mean teachers are failing. Often, they show the opposite: teachers are trying to move students forward while also handling absences, learning gaps, behavior problems, technology distractions, family stress, staffing instability and the pressure of constant measurement.
For parents, the question becomes practical. If a child is behind in math, who catches it? If a child stops reading at home, who notices? If a child is quiet but lost, who has enough time to see it?
“That’s what a good teacher does,” Angela said. “They know when your child is pretending to understand.”
Attendance is another warning sign
South Carolina’s public schools are also dealing with attendance problems that make every classroom harder to run.
The South Carolina Daily Gazette reported that about 23% of students were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, essentially unchanged from the year before. Chronic absenteeism generally means missing 10% or more of the school year. The South Carolina Department of Education says students enrolled for a full academic year who miss 18 or more days are considered chronically absent.
That is nearly a month of school.
When many students miss that much time, teachers have to teach the lesson, reteach the lesson, track missing work, contact families and keep moving. A teacher shortage makes that harder. A substitute rotation makes it harder still.
Angela understands attendance differently now. Before, she thought of it as a family responsibility. Get the child up. Get them to school. Do the right thing. Now she sees the other side.
“Kids have to feel like school is worth showing up for,” she said. “That means somebody knows them when they walk in.”
Pay has gone up, but the job has changed
South Carolina has invested in teacher pay. The state’s 2025-26 minimum salary schedule lists starting pay at $48,500 for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and no experience. The South Carolina Department of Education said in November 2025 that starting teacher salaries had increased 52% since 2019 and that Superintendent Ellen Weaver was seeking another $2,000 increase to bring starting pay to $50,500.
Pay matters. It helps recruitment. It helps retention. It signals respect. But pay alone does not solve everything if the job itself feels unsustainable.
Teachers are being asked to be instructors, counselors, attendance monitors, technology troubleshooters, behavior specialists, test-data analysts and social workers by another name. In many schools, they are doing that while covering classes, losing planning time or watching colleagues leave.
Parents see the exhaustion. Angela remembers one conference where Nia’s teacher apologized three times for being behind on email.
“She looked like she was about to cry,” Angela said. “I came in worried about my child, but I left worried about her, too.”
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Progress is real. So is the strain.
The state’s 2025 report cards showed some positive movement. South Carolina Public Radio reported that the number of schools rated “Good” or “Excellent” increased from 549 to 623. The South Carolina Daily Gazette reported the on-time graduation rate rose to about 87%, up from 85% the previous year.
Those gains deserve attention. They also do not erase what parents are seeing on the ground.
A school system can improve overall and still fail particular children. A district can reduce vacancies and still leave one middle school without a permanent math teacher. A state can raise pay and still lose young teachers to burnout. A report card can show growth while a parent at the kitchen table realizes her child has stopped believing she is good at math.
Public education is not one thing in South Carolina. It is a fast-growing suburban school near Charleston. It is a rural school in the Pee Dee. It is a crowded hallway in Columbia. It is a small district trying to recruit a speech therapist. It is a coastal school competing with housing costs. It is a parent checking the school app at night, trying to decode whether the system is working for her child.
What parents are asking for
Angela is not asking for perfection. She knows teachers get sick. She knows people change jobs. She knows principals cannot hire people who do not apply. She knows the pandemic changed children. She knows parents have responsibilities, too.
But she wants state leaders to understand that teacher shortages are not only a workforce issue. They are a student issue. They are a family issue. They are a trust issue. When a parent sends a child to school, the promise is not simply supervision. The promise is instruction, attention, consistency and care.
South Carolina has made progress in reducing vacancies. The next test is whether that progress reaches the classroom in a way families can feel. That means keeping teachers past the first hard years. It means making special education staffing a central priority, not a side problem. It means protecting planning time. It means helping principals build schools where teachers want to stay. It means treating counselors, psychologists, librarians and speech-language pathologists as essential to learning, not optional support.
Angela still believes in public school. That is why she keeps showing up. She checks homework. She attends meetings. She emails teachers carefully, trying not to add pressure. She tells Nia that school matters even when the adults seem stretched thin.
But belief is not the same as confidence.
One night in March, Angela found Nia at the kitchen table, staring at a math worksheet. The page was not blank. It was worse than blank. It was full of erased work. Angela sat beside her.
“Did they teach this?” she asked.
Nia shrugged.
That was the moment Angela says she felt the whole system sitting at her table, the vacancies, the turnover, the test scores, the pay debate, the report cards, the speeches, the promises.
All of it came down to one child, one worksheet and one parent trying to fill in for a teacher who should have had more help long before that night.
