The Texas Education Agency (TEA) recently announced that the US Department of Education has approved its list of teacher shortage areas for 2018-19. Computer Science is included in the list as part of the CTE secondary category.
What does this mean?
Including Computer Science on the list, allows administrators to use loan forgiveness opportunities as a tool for recruiting, retaining, and rewarding CS teachers. Other areas included on the list that might be of interest to the WeTeach_CS community include Technology Applications and Mathematics.
More information
For more information about the 2018-19 Teacher Shortage Areas and Loan Forgiveness Programs, see the original announcement from TEA for details and links. TEA also maintains a webpage with information about the Federal Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program. TASB’s HR Exchange (HRX) has also covered this topic here and here. The US Department of Education’s website provides information about Teacher Loan Forgiveness as well as Public Service Loan Forgiveness.