To help address the state’s perennial shortage of qualified public school teachers, the Department of Education is launching a pilot program aimed at encouraging educators already in classrooms, such as educational assistants, to become licensed teachers with a stipend incentive.

The new initiative is one of several strategies to improve recruitment and retention of qualified teachers. The DOE hires between 1,000 and 1,200 new teachers annually to fill vacancies. On the first day of school last August, there were more than 500 vacancies that had to be filled with either noncredentialed instructors working toward a teaching degree or substitute teachers.

State Sen. Michelle Kidani, chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, last fall initiated discussions between the DOE and the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s College of Education to find ways to fast-track licensing for the thousands of substitute teachers and educational assistants already employed by the DOE.

“Our goal was to find ways to recruit teachers locally — looking for people already in ‘the system’ committed to teaching, especially for hard-to-staff campuses in rural areas of our state,” Kidani (D, Mililani-Waikele-Kunia), who was traveling Tuesday, said in a statement. “Locally hired teachers are more likely to stay in Hawaii and hard-to-staff schools since they already live and work in our communities.”

Obtaining a teaching license in Hawaii generally requires that an individual have a minimum of a bachelor’s degree and complete an approved, accredited teacher-preparation program.

DOE data show that about half of the state’s 4,200 registered substitutes have a bachelor’s degree but have not completed a teacher-preparation program. Additionally, there are 3,100 educational assistants in the DOE (their college degree statuses are not known), and just under 400 emergency hires (who have three years to obtain a teaching credential) were on staff at the start of last school year.

Bachelor’s degree-holders in these three groups will be the target of the department’s new “Grow Our Own” initiative in partnership with UH Manoa. The program will pay candidates stipends to earn a post-baccalaureate teaching certificate in secondary education from UH’s College of Education. In return, participants must teach in Hawaii public schools for at least three years.

“These long-term fill-ins are committed to teaching, they’re often members of the communities in which their schools are located, but they’re simply unable to leave their jobs to earn their credentials and obtain a teacher’s license,” Kidani said of the target groups.

Officials are still working out the amount of the stipends, which will be paid out from $400,000 Kidani helped secure in the state budget for this fiscal year. Tuition for the university’s post-baccalaureate teaching degree is roughly $12,000 a year for the three-­semester program.

“We’re really targeting this to current DOE employees, and we’re doing that because in our discussions and in our data-mining, we realized that we have what we believe to be a built-in demand,” said Barbara Krieg, the DOE’s assistant superintendent for human resources. “And more than that, if we use current DOE employees who are in classroom positions … they can meet their student-teaching commitment in the course of their normal job duties.”

Candidates for the stipend program will need to have bachelor’s degrees that align with hard-to-staff subject areas, including English and reading, foreign languages, Hawaiian immersion, math, science and vocational/technical trades.

The university expects to begin accepting applications in the fall, with classes slated to begin in January and completion scheduled for May 2019. The college is considering an initial cohort of between 25 and 50 students. A combination of online and evening courses would be offered so that neighbor island candidates can participate.