Connection Before Compliance: But What Happens When the Teacher Goes Missing?

We talk a lot about student engagement. We talk about relationships, belonging, voice, choice, and purpose. I believe in all of those things. In fact, they have become central to the turnaround work at our Title I middle school. We have worked intentionally to create a school where students feel known, experience community, and have meaningful opportunities to influence the place they spend most of their waking hours.

There is a part of the conversation about student engagement that we don't talk about nearly enough. What happens when the adult who built the connection isn't there anymore? Not because the relationship wasn't important. Not because the teacher didn't care. Sometimes the teacher simply disappears.

When the Teacher Goes Missing

I don't mean "missing" literally, although some days in school leadership it can feel that way. A teacher accepts a position in another district for better pay. A hard-to-fill vacancy stays open. An international teacher who planned to return for another school year gets caught in a visa process thousands of miles away. Suddenly, the person whose name was printed on the master schedule isn't standing in front of students and the students notice.

Nationally, this isn't a small problem. The Learning Policy Institute's 2026 analysis estimates that more than 425,000 teaching positions are either unfilled or filled by teachers who are not fully certified for their assignments. That's roughly one out of every eight teaching positions in the country. Schools serving larger concentrations of students from low-income backgrounds and students of color experience even greater instability.

Editorial side note: Schools with state report card grades that don't yet reflect the turnaround before hiring season face additional hiring challenges. As a teacher, would you pick the F school? Arizona, you need to move faster to update school report card grades to accurately reflect school progress prior to the start of the school year. November is too late to serve our students.

For school leaders, those numbers become real very quickly. They become the science classroom without a science teacher. They become the class that has met three substitutes in two weeks. They become the student who finally trusted an adult and walks into school one morning to discover that adult isn't there.

We can call it a staffing shortage. Students experience it as something else. It is another relationship that disappeared.

Belonging Cannot Depend on One Person

This has forced me to think differently about one of the ideas my assistant principal and I have been sharing in our work around middle school engagement: Students engage when they feel known.

I still believe that completely, but I have added something to it. Students cannot be known by only one person. If a student's entire sense of connection to school rests on one teacher, one coach, one counselor, or one administrator, we have created a fragile system. One resignation can break it. One vacancy can break it. One visa problem can break it. One better offer from the district down the road can break it.

There are plenty of better offers. National research on teacher turnover shows that about one in seven public school teachers moves schools or leaves the profession in a year. Higher salaries, supportive leadership, and stronger working conditions are all associated with teachers being more likely to stay.

I can't personally solve the national teacher shortage from my principal's office in Phoenix. I can't control another district's salary schedule. I certainly can't control an international visa process, but I can control whether connection in my school is accidental or designed. That distinction matters.

Design the Connection

For years, schools have relied heavily on individual teachers to create belonging, and great teachers do. They learn the names of siblings. They know who plays soccer. They notice when a normally talkative student is suddenly quiet. They remember the student who loves anime, the one who draws during lunch, and the one who acts like they don't care about school but lights up when someone asks about their weekend.

Those relationships matter enormously, but school leaders cannot leave something that important entirely to chance. We have to build structures around it.

At our school, we have focused on three places where that can happen: relationships, homeroom experiences, and the master schedule. Our goal is to design adult practices and school structures that help students feel known, experience community, and have voice, choice, and purpose every day.

That means homeroom cannot simply be the place where we take attendance. It means flex time can become intervention, enrichment, tutoring, clubs, interest groups, social support, or teacher office hours. It means students need opportunities to tell us what they want from their school. Our Principal's Advisory Council gives students direct access to school leadership. Moving toward student-driven elective opportunities tells students that their interests matter. Clubs and interest groups give them another reason to find their people. None of those things replaces a great classroom teacher. That isn't the point. They create more places for connection to happen.

The Master Schedule Is More Than a Spreadsheet

I have come to believe that one of the most important student engagement documents in a school is something students will probably never see: the master schedule. We tend to think about it operationally. How many sections of seventh-grade math do we need? Who has first-period prep? Where can we put intervention? How do we cover the vacancy we still haven't filled?

Those questions are necessary. Believe me, when you're staring at an empty teaching position in July, they become very necessary. But every master schedule also communicates priorities. If we say relationships matter, where is the time for relationships? If we say intervention matters, where is the time for intervention? If we say students need enrichment, where is it? If we say student voice matters, where do students actually get to exercise it? If belonging matters only when an individual teacher manages to squeeze it between the bellringer and the exit ticket, then belonging isn't really part of our system. It's an extracurricular activity.

Four Questions Worth Asking

As we have worked through this, four questions have become increasingly important to me:

Can every student name an adult who knows them well?

Where in the school day do students consistently build belonging?

What decisions do students genuinely influence?

Can students explain why their learning matters?

I would add a fifth question now.

If one important adult leaves tomorrow, who else knows that student?

That question feels different when you lead a school during a teacher shortage. It should.

The Adults Need Connection Too

There is another side to this conversation that we cannot ignore. If we want teachers to create belonging for students, teachers need to experience belonging themselves.

Teacher retention isn't simply an HR problem. It is a student engagement problem.

When teachers leave, students lose instructional continuity. Remaining teachers absorb additional responsibilities. Classes can become larger. Planning time gets squeezed. Course offerings can disappear. Research on teacher shortages documents exactly those consequences, and there is a human cost that is harder to quantify:

The remaining staff get tired.

The new teacher walking into a difficult assignment needs someone to help.

The international teacher navigating a completely different educational system needs community too.

The veteran teacher wondering whether the district down the road will pay more needs reasons beyond guilt to stay.

Leaders cannot control every factor affecting teacher retention. Compensation matters. Policy matters. Housing costs matter. Visa processes matter. But culture matters too. The same principle applies to adults and students: people are more likely to invest in a community when they believe they belong to it.

Stop Asking How to Make Them Participate

Traditional school improvement often starts with an adult question: how do we get students to do what we have decided? I think we need a better one: how do we design a school students want to participate in and help create?

That doesn't mean students run the school. It doesn't mean every class becomes an elective or every decision goes to a student vote. It means we stop confusing compliance with engagement. A student sitting quietly in third-period science is present. That doesn't necessarily mean they are connected. A student completing an assignment because ten points are attached to it is compliant. That doesn't necessarily mean they see a purpose. A student who loves school because of one extraordinary teacher is fortunate, but our goal should be bigger than that.

We need schools where students have enough relationships, enough opportunities to contribute, and enough places to belong that the loss of one adult doesn't mean the loss of their connection to school.

Build Something Stronger Than One Relationship

Our turnaround didn't happen because we discovered one program that fixed student engagement. We didn't. We started redesigning the experience.

Relationships.

Homeroom.

Student voice.

Flex time.

Clubs.

Intervention.

Enrichment.

Electives.

Purpose.

The schedule.

Some worked immediately. Some needed adjustment. Some probably still do.

That is why we call this work Turnaround Unscripted. There isn't a script for the morning you learn the teacher you expected to welcome students in August is still in another country waiting for a visa appointment. There isn't a script for losing a strong teacher to a district that can offer something you cannot. There isn't a script for explaining another staffing change to kids who have already experienced too many adults coming and going. But, there can be a design.

We can build schools where connection doesn't live in one classroom. We can create a culture where multiple adults who know each student. We can protect spaces where community happens. We can give students meaningful decisions to make. We can design schedules that communicate that intervention, enrichment, relationships, and interests all matter. We can make belonging something students experience throughout the building rather than something they receive from one exceptional teacher.

Teacher shortage is real.

Turnover is real.

Vacancies are real.

Sometimes, despite everything a principal does, the teacher still goes missing. Our students shouldn't lose their connection to school when that happens. Connection before compliance isn't about creating one great relationship. It is about designing a school strong enough to keep a student connected when one relationship disappears.