The Alamance-Burlington school system began the new 2026-27 school year on Monday with 47 teaching vacancies, ABSS officials told The Alamance News Wednesday.
The number of vacant teaching positions in ABSS schools has declined steadily, compared to vacancies reported at the beginning of the three previous school years, based on data that the school system’s assistant superintendent of human resources, Dr. Yolanda Anderson, furnished to the newspaper Wednesday.
By comparison, the school system began the previous 2025-26 school year with 69 teaching vacancies, representing a 4.8 percent vacancy rate among a total of 1,437 teaching positions in ABSS schools, based on personnel data from the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI).
For the start of the 2024-25 school year, ABSS had 95 teacher vacancies, reflecting a vacancy rate of 6.8 percent among a total of 1,397 teaching positions in ABSS schools that year, according to DPI.
ABSS had 95 teaching vacancies in 2023-24, for an overall vacancy rate of 19.5 percent among 1,439 teaching positions, according to DPI’s annual “State of the Teaching Profession” report for that school year.
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I think we’ve got the right leadership in place and we are prioritizing academics – teaching and learning – exactly as we should be,” school board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves said Wednesday afternoon in an interview with The Alamance News. “To see [this improvement] year-over-year for the last three years is a step in the right direction for ABSS.”
Ellington-Graves said she’s optimistic about that the reduction in teacher vacancies will result in stronger academic performance for ABSS students.
“We are very optimistic about next week’s release of academic data for the 2025-26 school year, based on our preliminary numbers,” the school board’s chairman said Wednesday. “We are hopeful we are going to have a number of schools come off the low-performing list.”
DPI releases its School Performance Grades for all K-12 public schools – along with its A-F School Performance Grades and lists of low-performing schools and districts – on the first Thursday in September each year. The School Performance Grades are intended to give the public a snapshot of the percentage of K-12 public school students who were performing at grade level (i.e., grade-level proficient) by the end of the previous school year.
School officials had forecast in June that ABSS would also come off the state’s list of low-performing school districts.
ABSS was designated as a low-performing school district after a majority of its schools – 20 out of 36, or 55.6 percent – received a School Performance Grade of D or F, based on academic performance data for the 2024-25 school year, according to DPI.
It marked the first time that ABSS had been designated as a low-performing district since the state began using its current academic evaluation criteria in 2013-14.
ABSS was one of 23 North Carolina school systems to be designated as low-performing for 2024-25, effectively placing the local school system’s academic performance in the bottom 20 percent of 115 public school systems, based on the academic results released by DPI in September 2025.
ABSS officials told the school board in late June that preliminary results from end-of-course and end-of-grade tests administered in 2025-26 indicated that the percentage of students performing at grade level in reading, math, and science had increased by 7 percentage points between the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years.
The percentage of students who were grade-level proficient increased from an overall average of 43.2 percent in 2024-25 to an average of 50.2 percent in 2025-26, based on preliminary end-of-grade (EOGs) and end-of-course (EOCs) test scores that ABSS assistant superintendent of academics Dr. Sean McWherter presented to the board in June.
Another possible factor helping to ease teacher shortages ABSS could be the bump in teacher pay that the General Assembly included in the state’s biennial budget that Gov. Josh Stein signed on July 7.
The new state budget includes raises of up to 8 percent for existing teachers and increases the starting pay for teachers from $41,000 to $48,000 per year.
The school system welcomed approximately 22,083 students for the first day of the 2026-27 school year, ABSS chief communications officer Emily-Lynn Adkins told the newspaper Tuesday. That figure, which Adkins said was derived from state planning allotments, appears to be slightly lower than the 22,389 students who were enrolled in ABSS schools at the end of the first month of the 2025-26 school year.
