Indiana
Following a nationwide trend, Indiana's teacher vacancies persist • Indiana Capital Chronicle
New federal data shows that the majority of the country’s public K–12 schools had difficulty hiring fully-certified teachers heading into the current academic year — and Indiana districts are not immune to vacancies.
Officials at nearly 75% of public schools nationwide said they had trouble filling one or more vacant teaching positions before kicking off the 2024-25 school year, according to a survey study released by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.
The School Pulse Panel data published by NCES showed one-fifth of vacant teacher positions remained unfilled at the start of this school year — with many ongoing vacancies. As of Thursday, the Indiana Department of Education’s job board listed more than 1,300 available educator jobs statewide.
That’s an improvement from earlier this year. As of June, there were more than 2,200 vacancies for teaching positions statewide and nearly 1,000 openings for other jobs within school districts.
It’s a hopeful drop, too, compared to in 2022, when — not long after the COVID-19 pandemic — IDOE’s job board listed 4,200 open jobs within Indiana schools. More than 2,500 of the open positions posted were teaching jobs.
But many openings remain. Most of the unfilled positions in Indiana are for elementary, early childhood and special education positions.
The NCES data, collected in August, came from 1,392 participating public K–12 schools from every state and the District of Columbia. NCES did not release state-by-state numbers, however, instead releasing only aggregate country-wide results.
Areas with the most vacancies
On average, public schools reported having six open teacher positions before the start of the current academic year. By the first day of school, 79% of those positions were filled, according to NCES.
National survey results indicated that general elementary teaching positions, special education and English language arts positions were among the most commonly cited by public schools as having at least one teaching position to fill prior to the start of this school year. Special education remained the most difficult teaching position to hire for this year.
In the Hoosier state, 1,370 teaching positions were listed on IDOE’s jobs board as of Thursday. More than 2,600 school openings were available, overall.
A breakdown of specific teaching vacancies included:
- 15 in alternative education
- 23 in arts
- 25 in career and technical education
- 332 in early childhood
- 234 in elementary education
- 36 in ENL/ESL
- 33 in foreign language
- 58 in language arts
- 8 in library
- 77 in mathematics
- 25 in music
- 25 in physical education
- 77 in science
- 39 in social studies
- 286 in special education – 286
- 369 in other teaching positions
Why vacancies persist
Compared to the national estimate, public schools with a student body made up of less than 25% students of color reported filling a higher percentage of vacancies with fully certified teachers, per the NCES survey.
Schools with a student body made up of more than 75% students of color, as well as those in high-poverty neighborhoods, reported more vacancies.
Teacher shortages — especially in certain subject areas, like English-as-a-second-language classes and special education — have been particularly challenging for schools since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the NCES report.
Teaching salaries have also largely failed to keep up with inflation, and teachers’ morale declined following the pandemic. National experts cited increased issues with student behavior and a rise in mental health problems as contributing factors, too.
Still, the NCES survey results also noted that 64% of schools said “an overall lack of qualified candidates” and “too few candidates” applying for open positions were the top challenges in finding teachers to fill vacancies.
Compared to years past, though, the percentage of schools saying candidates felt like salary and benefits were not enough dropped for both teaching and non-teaching staff.
Indiana’s latest teacher compensation report revealed that Hoosier teachers’ average annual pay exceeded $60,000 for the 2023-24 academic year — a new high for pay.
The average teacher salary in Indiana during the last school year was recorded at $60,557 — up from $58,531 the year prior — and nearly all Hoosier school districts gave teachers a raise. But many teachers in the state — especially those with little to no experience — still make less.
IDOE has targeted teacher recruitment with multiple grants and other programming to increase the number of Indiana teachers and cut down on lingering vacancies, including the I-SEAL program — run by the University of Indianapolis’ Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning — that allows current teachers, including those on emergency permits, to get fully licensed in special education at no cost.
More than 1,100 teachers have enrolled in the program, and nearly 600 have completed it since its inception in 2021.
Nearly 3,600 new-to-teaching hires were also brought into schools during 2023-24, according to the most recent state data.
Separately, 4,464 full-time teachers who already had classroom experience were hired by districts across the state.
Indiana numbers further showed 55,971 teachers were retained in 2023-24 from the previous year. That’s compared to 55,227, the year before. There were 55,682 teachers who stayed in classrooms in 2021-22, and 56,999 in 2020-21.
Additionally, an education plan released by Republican governor-elect Mike Braun called for raises to Hoosier teachers’ base salaries, and “guaranteed” professional benefits like new parent leave, as well as improved health insurance options.
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Noah Bontrager is Indiana’s first sub-4-minute high school miler
Noah Bontrager is Indiana’s first sub-4-minute high school miler
Special to IndyStar
TOPEKA, Ind. – Indiana’s first high school boy to run a sub-4-minute mile is not from Indianapolis or its collar counties. Nor from the population centers outside Chicago, Cincinnati or Louisville, Ky.
Noah Bontrager has instead been influenced by the Amish culture of the state’s northeast corner. The 18-year-old lives in Shipshewana and is a senior at Westview High School, enrollment of 343, almost small enough to be in the smallest of Indiana’s four basketball classes.
The LaGrange County school is 15 miles south of the Michigan border, located on County Road 600 W., where horse-drawn buggies clip clop along the pavement. The track is fenced off from farmland. Horses graze nearby, and a cow once delivered a calf in an adjacent pasture, right in the middle of practice.
Running has evolved since 1954, when Roger Bannister first broke the 4-minute barrier at Oxford, England. Now it is a sport of high tech, featuring propulsive supershoes, biomechanic analysis, wavelights for record attempts, and the Strava app tracking workouts,
Yet tech doesn’t break records. Runners do.
This sport rewards simplicity and industriousness, two characteristics of the Amish lifestyle. Bontrager said he marvels at junior high runners who do chores before school, attend classes and track practice, then do more chores after school.
“I like to say they work all day. I think I got that from them,” he said. “And from my mom and dad.”
Bontrager is a Swiss-German Mennonite/Amish family name, originating from the German Bornträger, meaning transporter of liquids.
Noah’s paternal grandmother, Judy Bontrager, died in 2020 after a seven-year fight against pancreatic cancer. She once set trusses on a barn while a softball-sized tumor grew inside her.
Noah’s grandfather, Josey Bontrager, had dyslexia and never learned to read. He started a small-scale manufacturing business, Shipshewana Hardwoods, in the early 1970s. He built it into a company that became PalletOne, which was acquired for $232 million in 2020. Noah’s father, Lyle, still speaks Dutch to the grandfather.
“How do you build a multimillion-dollar business when you can’t read. How do you do that?” said Lyle, who is Westview’s cross-country coach.
“Stuff like that is ingrained inside of him somewhere. Just determination and grit.”
How Noah Bontrager became Indiana’s first high school boy to run a sub-4-minute
During the 2000s, other Indiana boys had ambitions to run a sub-4-minute mile: Austin Mudd, Cole Hocker, Lucas Guerra, Kole Mathison, Martin Barco. None made it, with Mudd’s outdoor 4:01.83 standing as a state record since 2011.
Bontrager had thought about it for a couple of years. At state last year, he set a 1,600-meter meet record of 4:02.60, equivalent to a 4:04.02 mile. Yet it was startling when he actually broke through.
For one thing, he was ill at the end of cross-country season, finishing second at state, behind Springs Valley’s Calvin Seitz. Bontrager was 43rd in the Brooks nationals Dec. 13 at San Diego – close to last place – and was 78 seconds behind winner Jackson Spencer of Herriman, Utah. It was such a pitiable run that Spencer consoled Bontrager afterward.
For another, Bontrager said skeptics didn’t think he should run the mile March 15 at the New Balance indoor nationals.
“Really, the mile? You should do the two-mile,” they told him.
Bontrager, a drummer, had a concert on Friday of the two-mile and declined to abandon Westview’s band. He would chase the dream on Sunday. Except when he arrived in Boston, meet officials told him he might not be racing the top milers. Maybe the second-to-last heat, they said.
One runner dropped out, and Bontrager was in the fast heat. He was all-in.
He was in third with 400 meters left, then seized the lead by running the last two laps in 58.57 seconds. Usually undemonstrative, Bontrager thrust his right index finger in the air as he broke the tape. His time – 3 minutes, 59.48 seconds – was a meet record and made him No. 7 on the all-time high school indoor list.
Sitting with his father in a restaurant afterward, enjoying a “juicy hamburger,” he was still processing it all.
“I was kind of in shock, even three hours after,” he said.
Perhaps more shocking?
In three subsequent meets, all in the Indianapolis area, Bontrager has sent vibes that sub-4:00 is just one step on a long journey. He could be on a world stage as soon as August.
Multi-sport athlete
Growing up, Bontrager was immersed in running culture but wasn’t confined to that. He played youth basketball and baseball, including a travel team with the latter. His peers went on to reach the Class 2A state basketball title game this year and baseball semistate last year.
“I do actually have hand/eye coordination, unlike the stereotypical runner,” he said.
His parents, Lyle and Erin, are former runners who were track coaches at the junior high. Noah discovered he was better at running than at other sports. Running was “the norm,” he reasoned. At Westview, it was.
Westview’s track coach, Matt Jones, and Lyle Bontrager are cousins.
Jones was seventh in the 1988 state cross-country meet, leading the Warriors to fifth as a team. Besides coaching, he is an electrician in the recreational vehicle industry and farms 350 acres.
Another Westview runner, Andrew Begley, was a four-time state champion in the mid-1990s before joining NCAA championship teams at Arkansas. Westview was third in the state in cross-country in 2017, behind champion Carmel, whose enrollment was 13 times greater.
And when Bontrager was an eighth-grader, he helped Westview win a state title in middle-school cross-country.
“Jumping the fence” is a phrase used to describe an Amish person, often a teenager, leaving the lifestyle to live in the modern world. Following the 1972 Supreme Court ruling in Wisconsin v. Yoder, Amish children are exempt from compulsory high school attendance.
Noah and three siblings were not raised Amish. Their Christian faith remains foundational, even though the parents attend one church and Noah another.
“He will give glory to God for the gift he’s been given,” his mother said.
No one in the family has graduated from college. Noah is committed to Notre Dame. His brother, Cole, 19, who ran 1,600 meters in 4:32 in high school, is a freshman at Rose-Hulman Institute.
Outsprinting the treadmill
Determination and grit – and talent – aren’t solely responsible for Noah Bontrager’s rise. Although his father and Jones are eager for him to join a sophisticated regimen at Notre Dame, it would be hard to identify better high school coaching.
No wonder Bontrager said he trusts in the training.
He runs perhaps 55 miles a week in the fall, 45 in the spring. He doesn’t do junk miles – i.e. slow runs for volume. Weight training is reflected in the pecs on his 5-8, 130-pound frame.
One workout is two sets of three-mile tempo runs at a 5:05-mile pace, with two minutes of rest between sets. For context, that is fast enough to be all-state in cross-country once, then twice, all in less than 33 minutes.
He did such a workout on a treadmill on a recent rainy day, then finished with 300-meter sprints. The machine maxes out at 16 mph. He was outsprinting the treadmill.
“His workouts are unreal,” Jones said. “Whatever I throw at him, he just does.”
Similarly unreal has been Bontrager’s assault on records:
>> March 28, Fall Creek Pavilion. He set a small-school meet record of 9:08.35 in the 3,200 at the Hoosier State Relays, running the last 800 in 1:59.33. Eighty minutes later, he ran a 1:50.88 anchor to bring Westview from ninth to fourth in the 4×800 relay.
Remember his devotion to band? He played drums until the third quarter of Westview’s 2A basketball title game against Parke Heritage at Bankers Life Fieldhouse that day, then hustled to the track.
>> April 17, Franklin Central. He set a Flashes Showcase record of 4:02.48, winning by six seconds. It was fastest mile ever run by a high schooler on Indiana soil.
>> April 24, Carmel. He ran the 3,200 in 8:42.18, just a tenth off the state record, closing in 57.89 – or eight seconds faster than Seitz’s last lap.
Bontrager could repeat his double win in the June 5 state meet at North Central. But he might skip the 1,600, focusing on a fast time in the 3,200. (Fastest in the nation is 8:31.80 by Spencer.)
Beyond that, there is the 3,000 in the under-20 nationals June 18-19 at Eugene, Ore. That selects a team for the U20 World Championships, set for Aug. 5-9, also at Eugene.
“That’s the goal,” Bontrager said.
He once thought he was no sprinter, but that was dispelled when he ran 400 meters in 49.78 two days after the Hoosier State Relays.
International racing requires closing speed. He has that now. He already had the worth ethic.
That’s a way of life around here.
Contact David Woods at dwoods1411@gmail.com.
Indiana
7 Indiana legislators face Trump-backed primary challengers after bucking him on redistricting
Seven Indiana Republican state senators are facing off Tuesday against primary challengers backed by President Donald Trump as he seeks to exact revenge over a failed redistricting plan.
Trump’s intervention in the typically quiet local primary races have brought a flood of money and national attention to the state. Roughly $12 million has been spent on advertising across the seven contests, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, most of which has come from Trump-allied outside groups opposing the incumbents.
The Republican-led state Senate dealt Trump a rare rebuke when it voted down a redrawn congressional map he backed that was designed to result in two additional seats for the GOP. It was part of a broader mid-decade redistricting battle playing out across the country ahead of this fall’s midterm elections, when control of the narrowly divided U.S. House will be up for grabs.
But ultimately, the heavy-handed pressure campaign from Trump and his allies backfired. Now, they are revisiting similar lines of attack in their bid to unseat the seven lawmakers, turning the contests into another test of Trump’s grip on the Republican Party.
The most expensive of the primaries is for the seat represented by state Sen. Spencer Deery, who’s facing a challenge from Paula Copenhaver, an aide to Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith. More than $3 million has been poured into ads in a district of approximately 135,000 people. Deery served as an aide to former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels when he was the president of Purdue University.
State Sen. Greg Goode is running in a three-way primary against two unrelated candidates with the same surname: Vigo County Council member Brenda Wilson, who has Trump’s endorsement, and Alexandra Wilson, a network engineer.
As NBC News reported last month, White House officials and Trump allies aggressively sought to push Alexandra Wilson out of the race, fearing she’d act as a spoiler in the race and help Goode survive.
State Sen. Travis Holdman, who’s been in office since 2008, serves in leadership as the third-most powerful Republican in the chamber. He is facing challenge from Blake Fiechter, a real estate agent who is backed by Trump. Fiechter briefly left the race in February, telling local media he was overwhelmed, but changed his mind after a White House visit in March.
State Sen. Greg Walker was set to retire last year after 20 years in the chamber, but reversed course amid the redistricting fight, where he notably broke down in tears speaking about his fear for the future if his party caved to Trump’s intimidation. State Rep. Michelle Davis, who was already planning to run for his seat, stayed in the race after his reversal and won Trump’s support. Walker’s campaign has spent just $73,000 on ads, while outside groups have funneled more than 1.3 million in ads in support of Davis.
State Sen. Jim Buck, 80, has served in the state Legislature since 1994, first in the state House before heading to the state Senate in 2008. He’s facing his first primary since joining the state Senate from Tipton County Commissioner Tracey Powell. Powell has Trump’s endorsement, while Buck has the backing of former Vice President and former Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
Elsewhere, state Sen. Linda Rogers, who owns and manages a golf course and a home building company, is running against Dr. Brian Schmutzler, an anesthesiologist who said on his campaign website that he opposes “government health mandates” and tax hikes. He’s also said he was motivated to run by the redistricting fight.
And state Sen. Dan Dernulc, who represents a district in the northern part of the state near Chicago, has faced far less outside spending in his fight against two challengers, Trump-endorsed Trevor De Vries, an insurance broker, and financial analyst Nader Liddawi. While the six other races have each seen more than $1 million in ad spending, Dernulc’s primary has only hit $346,000.
Trump also waded into one of the open primaries for the seat currently held by retiring state Sen. Eric Bassler, who voted against the redistricting effort. The president backed former state Rep. Jeff Ellington, who is facing two Republican opponents on Tuesday.
PLAINFIELD — Light spills from a window above a wooden fixture of the crucifixion at Saint Susanna Catholic Church as parishioners weave through the pews at the close of the 11 a.m. mass on a recent Sunday.
Most leave, but some stick around for coffee and doughnuts, a fundraising effort for the church’s prison ministry, which provides rosaries, Bibles and faith study materials to inmates at the Hendricks County Jail. In the hallway are stacks of letters to U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, Sen. Todd Young and Rep. Jim Baird, urging them to support programs to reduce hunger at home and abroad.
“Cuts to SNAP and international assistance have already put millions at risk,” the letter reads, citing Jesus’ refusal to turn a hungry crowd away in the Bible verse Matthew 14:16. “We can and must do better.”
Those cuts have been hallmarks of President Donald Trump’s administration, which has taken a less generous, and at times adversarial, approach to those in need globally as it looks to reduce spending. The strategy has contributed to a larger tension between Catholicism and the president; at the helm of this opposition is Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born pope, whose criticisms of the war in Iran have increasingly landed him in Trump’s crosshairs.
But Catholics across the nation, including at Saint Susanna, told USAToday and IndyStar that they favor the pope’s approach.
“He has done it elegantly, but yet very stern,” Eloisa Garza, who helps run the prison ministry, said of Pope Leo after mass at Saint Susanna on April 26. “Being an American, which we are Americans, that’s what sometimes other countries look at us to do as leaders.”
Garza, 70, said she appreciates that Pope Leo has the courage to speak when the world needs a powerful voice rooted in faith. His role as the first American-born pope only adds to the impact, she said.
She runs the prison ministry along with Harla Lyle, 84, who also commended the pope for his “quiet, serene composure.”
Even when in conflict with some world leaders, Lyle said, Pope Leo sticks to faith.
“I think that he really is a symbol,” she said.
The trust in Pope Leo comes as the pontiff fields blistering attacks from Trump. After the pope called Trump’s threat of annihilation in Iran “unacceptable,” the president fired back that Pope Leo was “weak on crime.”
The tension between the two men is sometimes amplified by Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic himself who has openly disagreed with the pope and warned him to be “be careful” when discussing theology.
American Catholics have largely backed the pope in the past, and the broader public has continued to view the pope favorably. More than two-thirds of U.S. voters who are Catholic said they view the pope favorably, according to a November 2025 poll. Three-fifths of Americans in general view the pope in a positive light, too, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found in April.
Chicago native John Paloma, who now lives in Camby, Indiana, said he used to live “down the road” from where the pope grew up. Paloma said he appreciated that the pope has not engaged in extended battles with those who criticize him.
“There might be some controversy, but as long as he keeps to the faith, what could you say?” he said, sitting at a table after mass with fellow parishioners. “My hope is still high.”
Bob Duty, an 84-year-old man sitting with Paloma, shared a similarly positive view.
“I like the pope,” Duty told IndyStar. “He’s from America.”
Contact breaking politics reporter Marissa Meador at mmeador@indystar.com or find her on X at @marissa_meador.
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