Despite a statewide and national teacher shortage, Carroll County is ahead of schedule filling teaching vacancies for next school year.

School administrators have hired about 80 of the 165 to 170 teachers they will need to start classes in August - an achievement that Human Resources Director Stephen H. Guthrie calls "very good."

"This year, we're real up front with the hires," he said. "It's just barely June and we're chugging along pretty well. We've had a flurry of new hires in the last couple days."

With fewer college students pursuing teaching and veteran teachers reaching retirement age, Maryland educators, like those in many states, have struggled to find enough teachers to fill their classrooms. But dire predictions from two years ago - a mass exodus and huge staffing shortages - have not materialized.

Rather, the annual scramble to find qualified teaching candidates and sign them to contracts - as ritualistic for school administrators in May and June as final exams and trips to the beach are for students - began earlier and earlier until teacher recruitment became a yearlong task.

"The problem is that there are about 1,500 [teaching] graduates in Maryland and 8,000 jobs," Guthrie said. "So we've got to go out of state."

Guthrie and his staff have taken 40 recruiting trips this year, as far north as New York, as far west as Ohio and as far south as North Carolina, although Western Maryland College and Towson University graduate a significant pool of teachers from which Carroll administrators choose job candidates.

Most early new hires are student teachers and substitute teachers who have done stints in Carroll schools. But school principals and recruiters also are quick to sign interviewees who impress them "tremendously," the ones they know they "want to get on board," Guthrie said.

Despite being in good shape through the beginning of this month, Guthrie is taking nothing for granted: "I wouldn't say we're not worried. The difference is after July 15. Any openings that occur after July 15 ... those applications are difficult to fill. For the most part, the applicants are out there right now. After July, they're gone and then we're looking."