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Last July, I wrote a column on the state Department of Education’s teacher recruitment program in the Philippines, which seems a promising way to resolve the long-term teacher shortage in our public schools.

Having not heard much about it in the news media and how the teachers were doing since then, I met with James Urbaniak, human resources officer with the DOE Office of Talent Management, whom I spoke with for my previous column. He serves as the lead recruiter in the Philippine teacher program.

While the program has been highly successful, it isn’t sufficient to fill the hundreds of vacant teaching positions. The primary problem remains that the Legislature hasn’t provided funds to raise salaries high enough to employ more teachers from Hawaii and the continental U.S.

As for the Philippine program, Urbaniak remarks that it is “doing phenomenally well. Every principal has said the teachers are hardworking and have changed the campus culture positively.”

He adds that he hasn’t heard of any complaints about the competence and quality of the teachers from the parents at the schools where they have been assigned.

Urbaniak, who is extremely enthusiastic about the program, says that a “Filipino renaissance” has occurred at some of the schools where the teachers are working insofar as they have revived Filipino student clubs, and the students express greater pride in their ethnic identity.

Two of the teachers at Farrington and Waipahu high schools will be introducing the new Filipino history and culture course next fall, and another teacher will be offering a Philippine language course.

Urbaniak emphasizes that, because of the requirements of the J-1 visas the teachers receive from the U.S. government, the primary goal of the recruitment program is cultural exchange and not to fill vacant teaching positions.

The teachers have been sharing Philippine culture at their schools through various activities and learning about the diverse cultures of Hawaii. They will impart this cultural knowledge in their classes after they return to the Philippines when their visas expire after five years.

While it may not be its main objective, the recruitment program has contributed to alleviating the teacher shortage problem beginning with the 78 who arrived last year. For the next school year, Urbaniak says he expects 100 Philippine teachers will be coming, most of whom already have been signed up by the recruiting agency the DOE works with in Manila.

The DOE administration sets an annual cap on the number of teachers hired from the Philippines. Otherwise, hundreds more could be assigned to the public schools.

Urbaniak relates that due to its successful outcomes and the continuing teacher deficit, the Philippine program will continue for the foreseeable future.

He remarks that as information about the teacher recruitment program spread in the Filipino community, applications from Hawaii Filipinos “have soared, and they are now the second largest group of applicants after whites.”

But at 8%, Filipinos still are highly underrepresented among DOE teachers, while they are the largest group of students at 24% but only 11% of University of Hawaii Manoa undergraduates.

Besides the teachers themselves, the success of the recruitment program can also be attributed to the Filipino communities on the islands where the teachers have been assigned.

Due to the time required for them to receive Social Security cards, they could not get paid by the DOE until they had been teaching for almost two months. Local Filipino communities assisted the new recruits by fundraising so that they could pay their rent for housing, and by contributing food and household goods.

Urbaniak says the DOE learned a lot from last year’s experience and has been partnering with Filipino community groups during the past year and to prepare for the arrival of this year’s cohort of teachers.

Including them and several hundred emergency hires, Urbaniak expects that the DOE will still need about 200 teachers at the start of the next school year in August, but that is much less than the huge vacancies of more than 1,000 in previous years.

The most viable way to resolve the teacher shortage problem is for the Legislature to provide more funds to hire fully qualified teachers. Note that these positions already exist but are vacant, possibly because of the salaries offered. As of Friday, 482 vacant teacher, librarian and counselor positions (mostly teacher) were advertised on the DOE employment website.

According to a recent article by Civil Beat education reporter Megan Tagami, state legislators just allocated almost $750 million to the DOE for school facilities, professional development, student mental health and other items. However, last year they cut about $170 million from the DOE budget.

Tagami also notes that lawmakers reappropriated $66 million for DOE construction projects that would not be completed by their June deadline when the funds would lapse. In addition, the legislature allocated a whopping $530 million more for school facilities.

Instead of facilities, legislators should seriously consider providing funds for hiring bonuses, such as those Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi announced in March for the Honolulu Police Department, which has a serious shortage of police officers. After a little more than a month, applications to join HPD increased by 54%.

While school facilities may be needed, they may not be needed as badly as a fully educated and licensed teacher in the classroom. Instead, the DOE continues to depend on emergency hires who, while they have a college degree — which doesn’t have to be in education — lack a teaching credential required to be a licensed teacher in Hawaii’s public schools.

According to the DOE Office of Talent Management, in the current school year, the DOE hired 343 such emergency hires, in addition to the 243 previously hired, who were all teaching while enrolled in a teacher education program to earn a teaching credential.

What’s the point of public school keiki being the first one to sit in a new cushioned chair in a new air-conditioned classroom with the latest high-tech instructional equipment if the person standing in front of them — if there is one — doesn’t have a degree in education and has never taught a class in their life?

Hawaii’s public school students and their tax-paying parents deserve much better than what they’ve been forced to accept over the decades. It’s high time that the Legislature, which had an overabundance of money during the last session, appropriate the necessary funds to resolve the teacher shortage problem so that students receive an adequate education as a bare minimum.

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.