Alabama’s teacher shortages are hitting harder in some schools than others. Statewide, rural and urban schools and those with large numbers of students in poverty tend to have a harder time hiring and retaining teachers.

They also tend to have more teachers using emergency certificates to teach in a classroom. There are a lot of reasons for that; a statewide teacher retention task force is looking at ways to ease that problem.

An emergency certificate is a professional teaching certificate, but it means the teacher hasn’t completed all of the requirements to get a full teaching certificate yet. A teacher must have a bachelor’s degree and pass a background check. A superintendent must request an emergency certificate for a teacher.

Teachers using emergency certificates are allowed to teach up to four years in a classroom. If they haven’t completed the requirements by that time, they either become long-term substitutes – at lower pay, usually – or they leave the school.

Read more: Alabama schools increasingly rely on emergency certified teachers

A teacher using an emergency certificate could be replaced by a fully certificated teacher at any point, which adds to teacher turnover problems.

This matters a lot to the students being taught, because a teacher using an emergency certificate likely doesn’t have much experience teaching or it could be the teacher hasn’t yet passed the test showing they know the subject they’re teaching to students.

That isn’t always the case – sometimes a retired engineer might want to teach a middle school math class and is working their way through the state’s requirements to get a full certificate. And sometimes a teacher may have graduated from a teacher prep school but just hasn’t yet passed the subject-area test.

But generally speaking, emergency certificated teachers – as opposed to fully certificated teachers – have less experience and can lack either teaching skills or content knowledge.

AL.com took a look at the teacher certification data schools are required to report each year under federal law to see which schools have the highest proportion of teachers using emergency certificates. The information is publicly reported on the federal school report cards.

During the 2021-22 school year – the most recent data available – data shows two schools, both located in Alabama’s Black Belt where poverty levels are high, had half of their teachers using emergency certificates.

Another 34 schools located in 16 districts, two-thirds of which are located in rural areas, had between one-quarter and one-half of their teaching staff using emergency certificates.

On the flip side, 585 schools didn’t have a single teacher using an emergency certificate. Five entire school districts had zero teachers using emergency certificates.

Statewide, 2,144 teachers, or 4.4% of the state’s 48,643 teachers, taught using emergency certificates in the 2021-22 school year. That’s five times the number of emergency-certificated teachers five years earlier during the 2016-17 school year.

Here’s a look at the data. Click here if you are unable to see the table.