School districts are responding to the nationwide teacher shortage by building planned housing programs to attract and retain educators.
One driver of the teacher shortage cited by superintendents is the lack of affordable housing for their staff to live close to where they work.
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California’s Mountain View Whisman School District, in which the median home value is around $1.5 million, has constructed affordable subsidized housing for staff, and other communities have planned villages with amenities beyond housing.
On Tuesday, Bentonville Public Schools in Arkansas achieved a major step in building a comprehensive housing community for school staff after Attorney General Tim Griffin determined the school district could constitutionally donate a 9-acre plot of land to a local nonprofit group for development.
Bentonville has undergone “explosive growth,” CEO Jeff Webster of the nonprofit Excellerate Foundation told the Washington Examiner.
The Bentonville area is home to massive and expanding companies such as Walmart, food processing company Tyson Foods, and trucking company J.B. Hunt Transport Services, and such growth has contributed to skyrocketing housing prices.
Home prices in the area have jumped 4.2% since July of last year, according to Zillow, with the average house costing nearly $435,000, a price Superintendent Debbie Jones told the Washington Examiner is unsustainable for teachers.
“We would offer jobs, and in the summertime, people would accept those jobs. And then they’d start looking in the housing market,” Jones said. “I had three I’m aware of that had to turn around and resign those contracts, never moving here.”
Historically, her district has been able to hire 140 teachers per year with “highly competitive” salaries, but it has become much more difficult to fill positions, especially young teachers graduating college, she explained.
The district needed to find a solution and began exploring housing options in other districts, such as San Francisco, Los Gatos, and Palo Alto. Complexes can also be found in Austin, Texas, and the Pojoaque Valley School District near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
But Jones, Webster, and other local stakeholders sought their own model, something they say is unique to Bentonville and local in nature, to benefit “a little corner of the world called northwest Arkansas,” Webster said.
“Our goal is for a young starting-out teacher that has a household income of maybe $50,000 to $60,000 to actually be able to purchase a home and participate in the benefits of home ownership as far as equity appreciation, etc.,” Webster added, explaining that he wants to help young people in the area be able to get on the “first step” of the “housing escalator.”
Missing that step “runs the risk of passing it for a long time or potentially forever,” he continued. In Bentonville, they are looking for a situation in which “as home prices are rising, [residents] are rising with them.”
Despite the fact that housing is not traditionally the concern of a school district, Jones sees it as an opportunity.
“Just because it’s never been our responsibility to seek affordable housing doesn’t mean that it’s not smart to do that as a school district because our major responsibility is to be able to hire the best, and if there are roadblocks that prevent us from doing that, then we have to take whatever means necessary to remove that roadblock,” she said, explaining that housing prices are “increasingly” that roadblock.
The building plans are split into three primary sections of about 100 total units. The first 60 would be in an apartment complex, while an additional 20 would be “cottage size” single-family homes, which would also be rentals. The final 20 are single-family homes that will be available for purchase and allow some to cycle up from the apartment to home ownership.
Jones added that the plot of land is in a prime location within a 5-mile radius of six to seven schools.
The entire project is expected to cost between $20 million and $25 million, which will be the topic of discussion at the Sept. 19 school board meeting now that Griffin has given the idea the constitutional green light.
“It’s much more than simply, ‘Let’s build some buildings and let people move in,'” Webster said. “We got our local banks that will help with preparing for whole homeownership, preparing people to make sure that their whole credit scores, etc., are in the right place as they go into this. And then it’s ongoing programs to make sure that as they’re here for a time in this development, and get ready for their next home beyond that, it’s helping those people be on a pathway to achieve those things as well.”
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The Excellerate Foundation aims to bring together state, local, and private interests.
“It’s our people. It’s our community. It’s our challenge. It’s our problem. And collectively, if we all come together and do our part in different ways, we can make a difference,” Webster said. “That’s what northwest Arkansas is good at, and that’s what you’ll see happen across this.”
