The Chinook School Division is working on teacher recruitment strategies with a significant portion of their staff turning over in the next 10-15 years.
They could be facing replacing up to 240 retiring teachers in that time.
"We will have some work to do," said Ken Garinger, Superintendent of Human Resources at Chinook School Division. "It's a significant number of teachers in that demographic."
An extra challenge has been changes in Ontario that now allow school divisions to hire teachers on contract out of university, which takes away a recruiting edge western schools used to have.
That means Chinook will be hoping for increases from western schools.
"It's not easy finding teachers right now," Garinger said. "We've expanded our recruitment efforts to Medicine Hat College and the Mount Royal program. We've heard they will be expanding their program to allow for more teachers to graduate."
Another strategy is financial incentives for interns.
"We're one of very few school divisions in this province that offer any sort of stipend to an intern," Garinger said. "Our board this year voted to increase our stipend to $1500."
Garinger noted in a presentation to the school board they have tripled their number of interns from the University of Regina.
Seventeen interns were placed in Chinook School Division this year. Four were then hired in some capacity at the division.
The University of Saskatchewan has also changed their policy to allow interns to go anywhere in the province, including southwest Saskatchewan.
Chinook also highlighted attending face-to-face career fairs at the University of Saskatchewan, University of Regina, and Medicine Hat College.
The school division has a total of 416 full and part-time in-scope teachers.