AMERICAN FORK, Utah (KUTV) — With students returning to classrooms next month, school districts across Utah are still working to fill hundreds of teaching positions, particularly in elementary and special education.

While Utah has one of the nation’s strongest teacher retention rates, staffing shortages remain a challenge as districts prepare for the start of the school year.

Parent Brenda Petroff said she believes low teacher pay continues to be one of the biggest factors contributing to the shortage.

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“Utah in general has a teacher shortage,” Petroff said. “They can get paid a lot more in other states.”

She said increasing teacher salaries could help attract and keep more educators in Utah classrooms.

“I just feel like they need to be paid more,” Petroff said. “I feel like they need to teach them things that they’re going to use in life.”

According to state data, hundreds of teaching positions remain open statewide, with elementary education among the areas experiencing the greatest need. State data also reports that about 11% of Utah teachers are considered underqualified or not fully qualified for the positions they currently hold.

Cami Harper, a former teacher turned executive director of human resources for the Alpine School District, said an underqualified teacher is someone who has not yet earned the appropriate license for the subject or grade level they are teaching.

“Luckily, the state has made it very easy and is willing to work with teachers to get a license to allow them to be qualified,” Harper said.

The Alpine School District is looking to hire about 22 teachers before the school year begins.

Harper said the district’s greatest staffing needs are in special education and certain specialized secondary subjects, where applicant pools tend to be smaller.

“For us and the state, special education is a very high-need area,” Harper said. “We’ve been blessed to have great candidates apply, but we don’t have as many applicants applying for those positions.”

Harper said Alpine has fewer vacancies than in previous years, in part because of declining enrollment — a trend affecting several districts across the state.

KUTV contacted nearly a dozen Utah school districts for updated vacancy numbers and information about their hiring efforts. Many district officials were unavailable because of the holiday week. This story will be updated as additional information becomes available.

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The move gives the Aggies “instant credibility” on the recruiting trail, Bronco Mendenhall says.

SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — In the middle of Utah’s drought, an environmental group is calling out what it labeled “hysteria” over water supplies for Wasatch Front cities.

“We’ve heard for 50 years that Utah is about to run out of water for its cities,” said Zach Frankel, director of the Utah Rivers Council. “And it’s a myth.”

Frankel, a frequent presence on Utah’s Capitol Hill, said cities — including the people who live in them — account for only a sliver of Utah’s total water use.

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He said that water rates are so low we have “the most wasteful water users in the country” and that outdoor watering could be dramatically curtailed with little to no impact.

Claims of running out of water, Frankel said, are aimed at pushing pricey, publicly funded water construction projects.

Ogden is embarking on a $100 million replacement of a 100-year-old pipeline through Ogden Canyon aimed at “improving reliability, reducing water loss, and supporting long-term water security.”

The Weber Basin Waster Conservancy District is not driving or financing the construction, but is involved with it, and the general manager called the Utah Rivers Council position “hogwash.”

“We’re not doing projects … just to spend hundreds of millions of dollars,” said GM Scott Paxman. “We are running out of water.”

Paxman said 20,000 more homes are already approved and/or permitted within the district boundaries, and even more permits are likely in Ogden Valley, Summit and Morgan Counties.

Laura Briefer, director of the Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities, said the city rates have gone up, and are “encouraging conservation.”

Frankel said conservation efforts can go further, even as more and more water is diverted in northern Utah from agriculture to growing communities — water that will not end up in a near-record-low Great Salt Lake.

“If you went to the gas station and saw someone pouring gasoline on the sidewalk while simultaneously simply telling us, ‘We’re running out of gas,’ it would be, ‘What are you talking about?’” Frankel said. “Put the nozzle back.”

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