Sancti Spíritus will start the school year with a deficit of 1,740 teachers.

On September 2nd, when the new school year begins in Cuba, there will be a deficit of around 1,740 teachers in the province of Sancti Spíritus.

The situation is worse than the previous year, when the school year ended with a need for about 1,500 teachers, whose absence particularly affected technical, primary, and basic secondary education, in the specialties of Mathematics, Spanish, History, and the subjects of the polytechnic schools.

According to the weekly Escambray, the authorities in the sector have planned to cover the shortage of teachers with around 2,045 alternatives - mainly hourly contracted teachers and others with overload - but there are still about a hundred positions to be filled in secondary and pre-university education.

But those "solutions" will not be full-time and many times they are not entirely suitable.

The report from the state newspaper acknowledges that the shortage of stable and competent teachers is felt in the results of promotion and quality in the province.

"It is appreciated, for example, in the greater number of students who need to retake exams, mainly in pre-university and secondary education. It is also evident in the gaps in knowledge that often later affect the grades in the entrance exams for higher education," the text details.

With more than 460 schools where over 65,700 students are enrolled in all levels of education, Sancti Spíritus has been facing the problem of a teacher shortage for many years.

This has forced the placement of students from teaching careers or other specialties in front of classrooms, to hire other professionals, to increase the workload of teachers, or to have sector managers and hundreds of re-employed retirees teach classes.

At the end of last October, almost two months after the start of the 2023-2024 school year, Cuba faced a deficit of more than 17,000 teachers.

By the end of September, there was a shortage of 17,278 teachers. The number increased by about 7,000 educators in just one month, as at the end of August, before the start of the school year, authorities had acknowledged the absence of 10,000 teachers, reported the independent media 14ymedio.

At the basic secondary level, there were at least 3,200 teachers missing, so the coverage was only 88.9%. The provinces most affected were Havana, Mayabeque, Artemisa, Matanzas, and Sancti Spíritus.