2026 Education Outlook: Gearl Loden

Loden’s 2026 Projection: The people that stay focused on what really matters and what they can control are going to continue to have success. Simple things that we can advocate for [include] just to have control over our [school-year] calendar, so we can be innovative. There’s a lot of data on the year-round calendar. Tennessee has been using it for years, Southern states are using it, and we’re so locked down that we can’t really start as early as we need to. So our calendar grinds our teachers ... it’s like an endurance race instead of a marathon, where you can slow down at different times. I’m optimistic, though.

What gives you hope for the coming year in education?
We need to, as leaders, embrace that the world we’re in is changing, and I think most people would agree that it’s getting faster and more complex and dynamic. And as educators, that means that our students need us more than ever. And as a society, when roughly 90% of our children are going to go to a public school, if when we look at the future and all the changes we’re going to have with workforce development, the way the workforce is going to change, and jobs, health care, everything’s changing with technology and just different things, the schools are needed more than ever. So that means we’re going to do our best to educate children and serve them and meet the needs of our teachers, too, so we have the best classroom teachers we can have available to take care of our students.

What are some of the challenges? What’s keeping you up at night when maybe you worry or contemplate what’s going on here for the next year?
I’m not going to let anything keep me up at night, but what I do see on the horizon – if you want to look at maybe the scary things that are out there – there’s a lot of uncertainty in just the federal and state level as far as the direction we’re going. …Trying to keep up with inflation in Nixa and our entire region, we’re all trying to put as much local dollars into teacher pay as we can. Because I don’t think the average person realizes that back in the early ’70s, we had over 175,000 people graduating to be teachers. Now we only have about 70,000-90,000 per year, and then we’re having to shore up a lot of our gaps, and we can have about 175,000-180,000 enter the profession, with all the alternate route certifications. But there’s over 250,000 people leaving the profession every year, and we have more kids than we did in the ’70s, so there is a major void and gap in the number of people that we need in the classrooms and that are available, and then a large portion of the people that are filling the jobs are nontraditional. So at Nixa, we’ve been reimagining. A couple of times, we’ve basically revamped the way that we onboard new teachers to the profession and new teachers to Nixa, because our teachers are our greatest intervention. And I think one thing that’s tagging us really hard is the fact that college tuition is going up. Teacher pay has not. And now you’re looking at a job that pays less than $45,000 a year and walking in with a lot of debt. When I have a chance to advocate, I advocate for the future of education. … We’ve got to have not just teachers, but the best students that are the smartest that can teach math and science and help us to make sure that we have a competitive advantage compared to other nations when our students walk out of school.