GUILDERLAND — The widely reported teacher shortage has not hit the Capital Region as hard as other parts of the nation, according to Guilderland Superintendent Marie Wiles — except in one very specific way.

Guilderland could not find someone to teach German for the upcoming school year so students who were studying German in middle school had to choose a different foreign language.

“We just could not find a certified individual through any means to support our middle school students, which is sad. We’re just devastated about that,” Wiles told The Enterprise this week.

Middle-school students who studied German in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades who are starting their freshman year of high school next month will also have to study another foreign language.

The district’s sole German teacher — who taught classes at both the middle school and the high school —  told the district in May she wanted to retire and did so at the end of the last school year, Wiles said.

“So that began our search to try to hire another German teacher, which is very, very, very hard to find,” said Wiles.

Posting on a statewide database resulted in zero applicants — “not even one,” said Wiles.

So then the district posted to a national organization, which netted two applicants — one from Arizona and the other from Texas.

“Neither of them were viable candidates to come here to New York and teach,” she said.

So Guilderland next tried to work with neighboring districts to set up a distance-learning program for German.

“We needed to find a school district that also had a German teacher who would then be willing to broadcast to another school district,” said Wiles. “We had a couple of leads but, to make a long story short, none of them panned out.”

Wiles went on, “We reached out to colleges, universities, everybody we could think of who might have a person who would be certified or certifiable in order to provide that instruction to our students. And they just don’t exist.”

Asked about the number of affected students, Marcia Ranieri, the district-wide administrator for foreign languages, reported that, of the 27 students originally slated to take German in eighth grade, one has chosen to study Italian, one has chosen to study French, and 25 are now taking Spanish Immersion 8 with two co-teachers using the spiralized curriculum called Somos. Additionally, 12 students initially slated to take German 2 are now taking Spanish Immersion 2 using a similar program of Somos. 

The district prioritized the high school students who needed to reach “checkpoint B” as a diploma requirement by providing a remote German course for them, Wiles said. Those 14 students, Ranieri reported, are taking German 3 through the Apex/Edmentum online learning platform with live lessons and on-demand teacher feedback and grading support.

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At Guilderland, students are surveyed in fifth grade about which foreign language they want to study, which until this year included Spanish, French, Italian, and German.

Currently, Guilderland employs 9.6 teachers of foreign languages at the middle school and another nine teachers for high school classes.

According to data compiled this week for The Enterprise by Marcia Ranieri, the district-wide administrator for foreign languages, Farnsworth Middle School has 672 students studying Spanish, 240 studying French, and 149 studying Italian while Guilderland High School has 583 studying Spanish, 212 studying French, and 89 studying Italian. Additionally, 60 high school students are studying American Sign Language.

Finding teachers of Italian is also difficult, Wiles said, so a lottery is used to decide who gets to study Italian. “We right now have two Italian teachers, both of whom are excellent, and their classes are full, especially at the middle school, full to capacity, with 30 kids,” said Wiles. “Hopefully, we can hang on to these two gentlemen who teach Italian.”

Middle school students study their chosen language in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, completing an exam, known as “checkpoint A,” at the end of eighth grade, which gives them their first high school credit for a foreign language.

Then, at the end of their sophomore year in high school, after completing the third level, they take an exam for checkpoint B.

Those students “in the pipeline” studying German are the ones the district has prioritized for the upcoming school year. “What we were able to find for them … is an online German teaching program,” said Wiles. “It’s with a live certified teacher, but it’s all remote instruction.”

Fourteen Guilderland students will be taught German that way this year so they can complete their sequence.

In 2010, the district, then in a budget crunch, had proposed cutting German classes entirely and was met with a groundswell of support for the language. Students, parents, and teachers alike spoke with passion about the importance of teaching German and the district kept the program going.

Wiles stressed that, this year, the cutback had nothing to do with the budget. She said the district had no inkling during the budget process that the German teacher was going to retire.

In 2010, the district had 70 students studying German at the middle school and another 70 at the high school.

The numbers have been dwindling since then, said Wiles. Not only has the number of Guilderland students wanting to study German been declining, so, too, are the local programs that train teachers of German, Wiles said. Area schools are phasing out their German programs, she said.

When the current German teachers retire, Wiles said, “There is no pipeline to replace them.”

Guilderland will continue to offer juniors and seniors the opportunity to study Spanish, French, and Italian — sometimes collaborating with college programs.

“Some of our neighboring more rural districts have very much struggled to find language teachers,” Wiles said, “but we’ve been fortunate in that respect.”