There’s a halo around the teaching profession: Most people remember at least one special teacher from their youth with particular admiration. So many people aspire to the vocation — quite a few of them without full realization of how hard the job really is.

And so the state Department of Education hires between 800 and 1,200 new teachers every year, but only roughly half of them have been sticking it out beyond five years, according to often-cited national estimates.

Encouragingly, the DOE has found that mentoring helps to move the young teachers past that initial, intimidating first hurdle. According to figures published this week, new-teacher retention is at 60 percent, the highest it’s been in a decade.

The reason, of course, is that the new arrivals need some road-tested ideas, some basic support and, above all, the sense that they’re part of a team. Devising the best way to deliver this help primarily has been left to the schools, each of which faces a different set of circumstances.

But department officials need to make sure that what’s been learned in the laboratory is shared broadly across campuses, all of which are dealing with some similar concerns. Further, there needs to be more attention paid to recruitment to fill all the vacant teacher positions.

Nationally, classroom challenges have mounted in the past several decades. In the 1980s the average tenure of a new teacher staying in the profession was about 15 years. Since then, an increasingly diverse student population beset by socioeconomic problems has compounded the demands of the teaching profession.

The extent of the teacher dropout problem may be debatable. According to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics released earlier this year about teachers who started work in 2007-2008, attrition after five years may have been closer to 17 percent.

Still, in Hawaii it is undeniably a problem and is especially acute at individual schools; Campbell High School, for example, had 40 new teachers last year, officials said. That kind of turnover makes it difficult to build a solid learning environment.

In recent years, the state’s 12,700 teachers working at the system’s 255 schools were introduced to what officials call a more robust and disciplined induction and mentoring program, geared to support teachers in their first to third years of teaching.

Kathryn Matayoshi, state superintendent of schools, said the program at schools with high mentorship needs, such as Campbell, used full-time teacher-mentors who left the classroom to devote their attention to teacher training. At other schools with fewer new teachers, she said, part-time mentorship may be enough. Clearly, tailoring the program to each school is the right approach.

But the work doesn’t end here, Corey Rosenlee, the new president of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, rightly observed. There are still too many teachers leaving each year, leaving more openings than the department can fill with well-qualified teachers; the DOE relies too heavily on emergency hires and sometimes struggles to find enough of them, even temporary substitute teachers.

Correcting this is a difficult, long-term project, and it will require money. The next round of negotiations will have to be complete and funded by the 2017 Legislature. The DOE must take a look at how it can compensate teachers adequately, especially in a state where the cost of living more than offsets the starting salary of $44,538.

Some of the attrition may be attributed to the frustration over recent changes in public education, including the testing regimes and the transition to the Common Core standards.

Continuing mentorship and encouraging teacher feedback on this process will be key to continued improvements in teacher retention statistics. Sustaining the effort is critical to those who truly need the consistency and support of good teachers — Hawaii’s keiki.