What staffing model best fits current realities: reallocations, hybrid roles, itinerant teams, grow-your-own pipelines, or regional partnerships? I get asked some version of this question every time I sit down with a superintendent’s cabinet or a central office team that is trying to build a master schedule before the ink on last year’s budget has even dried.
And I understand the urgency behind it, because the honest answer is that most districts are not choosing a staffing model anymore. They are reacting to one that circumstances chose for them, and then calling the scramble a strategy.
Before I answer the question directly, let me take you back to a morning early in my military career that I have never fully told the way I am about to tell it now.
As a young Company Commander, I inherited a unit that was short the specialized personnel required for an upcoming readiness certification. The temptation, and the thing nearly every officer around me was doing, was to borrow bodies. Pull a soldier from supply, hand him a checklist, and hope the training stuck long enough to pass inspection. It is a fast fix. It also does not last, and everyone in the unit knows the difference between someone who was placed and someone who was prepared.
I remember standing in that motor pool, looking at a roster full of names I had rearranged three times that week, and realizing I was solving a personnel puzzle instead of building a capable team. So I stopped rearranging and started asking a different question: who on this roster already has the aptitude for this work, who nearby has the capacity we lack, and what would it take to grow the first and borrow the second, on purpose, with a plan behind it instead of panic. That shift changed everything about how I led people for the next three decades, in uniform and out of it.
School systems make the same mistake I almost made in that motor pool. Leaders see a vacancy, feel the pressure of an empty classroom or a missing paraprofessional, and reach for whatever is closest. They reallocate a reading specialist into a homeroom because the master schedule demands a body in that seat, without asking whether that specialist’s expertise is now buried instead of used. They stitch together a hybrid role, asking one person to be part counselor and part testing coordinator, without protecting the hours that role actually requires to succeed. They call it flexibility. It is really just improvisation wearing a job description.
The best answer is not a single model at all, and that is the part administrators resist hearing because it sounds less tidy than a policy memo. Districts that are actually stabilizing their workforce are treating reallocations, hybrid roles, itinerant staffing, homegrown pipelines, and regional partnerships as instruments in the same orchestra rather than competing philosophies.
Alaska’s statewide service agency, the Southeast Regional Resource Center, has shown for years that itinerant specialists can reach hundreds of students across dozens of remote districts when the arrangement is built around shared governance and clear scheduling rather than a single overworked traveler trying to cover impossible ground (files.eric.ed.gov, 2020).
Researchers at Brown University and Old Dominion University have found something similar about grow-your-own efforts: the programs that hold up over time are the ones designed as a coherent pathway from community member to credentialed teacher, not a scholarship bolted onto an existing hiring process with no support in between (Edwards & Kraft, 2024). Rural districts in Texas and across the Northeast are proving that regional partnerships work when superintendents treat neighboring districts as allies solving a shared problem rather than competitors for the same shrinking applicant pool (American Institutes for Research, 2023; Meyer, 2025).
Notice what all three examples have in common. Someone slowed down long enough to ask what the community, the staff, and the students actually needed before choosing a structure. That is the discipline this moment requires. Not a bias toward the newest idea, and not a stubborn loyalty to the way things have always been staffed, but a willingness to look honestly at your own roster, your own geography, and your own bench of local talent, the way I finally looked at that motor pool, before deciding which tool fits which problem.
So here is what I am asking you to do this week:
- Pull your current staffing plan and your vacancy list side by side, and for every gap, name out loud which of these five approaches actually matches the root cause rather than the symptom.
- Then bring that analysis to your leadership team before the next budget conversation, not after it.
The teacher shortage described in the Learning Policy Institute’s most recent overview will not resolve itself, and it will not wait for a perfect plan (Learning Policy Institute, 2025). It will, however, respond to a leader who finally asks the right question before reaching for the nearest answer.
#EducationalLeader,
Kim
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