Districts have become skilled at recruiting teachers to fill open positions. But when the conditions driving turnover remain unchanged, vacancies continue to return.

In "Beyond the Vacancy: Why Districts Can’t Recruit Their Way to Workforce Stability," the first webinar in Impact Florida’s Strengthening the Teacher Workforce series, Jessica Solano examines why recruitment and retention need to be addressed together. Drawing on Impact Florida’s work with Florida school districts, the session shows how leaders can move from reacting to vacancies toward building a more stable teacher workforce.

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

Look beyond overall retention rates to better understand which teachers are leaving, where turnover is happening, and what may be contributing to it.
Build a cross-functional teacher workforce team that brings together HR, school leaders, academics, professional learning, district leadership, and other key perspectives.
Make teacher retention a clear, protected priority with senior leadership support, dedicated team time, regular review of evidence, and clear follow-through.
Combine workforce data, teacher feedback, and school context to define a specific problem before selecting a solution.
Move beyond short-term responses and focus on conditions that can shape whether teachers stay, including school leadership, workload and expectations, onboarding, mentoring, instructional support, and professional growth.
Test solutions with a smaller group first, gather feedback, make adjustments, and expand only when the evidence supports doing so.

The webinar also highlights what this approach can look like in practice. One county increased teacher retention from 83% to 93% after making retention a clear district priority and building systems to support the work. In another county, 91% of teachers who participated in a new mid-year orientation returned the following year, compared with 75% districtwide.

Keep learning with the Strengthening the Teacher Workforce series

Six remaining webinars take district teams deeper into each step, including building a teacher workforce data plan, defining the problem, gathering stakeholder input, identifying root causes, designing a prototype, and planning for implementation.

Each session includes a practical resource your team can use to begin applying the work in your district. We also encourage participants to attend with colleagues who may become part of their teacher workforce team.

Register for upcoming webinars

A digital resource to guide your team through the work

Impact Florida is also developing a Teacher Recruitment + Retention Resource, launching in summer 2027.

The digital resource will translate lessons from the Teacher Workforce Cadre into a step-by-step experience that district teams can work through together at their own pace. It will include practical guidance, tools, and examples from Florida districts to help teams understand a workforce challenge, identify its causes, test a response, and use what they learn to guide next steps.

Interested in following the resource as it develops? Sign up to receive updates and be among the first to know when it becomes available.

Learn more + sign up