Sacramento area schools grew teacher count by 11% amid recent wave of new hires

The Abridged version:

• In the Sacramento region, the number of K-12 teachers has grown by 11% since the 2019-20 school year while enrollment stayed relatively flat.
• Adding transitional kindergarten to school districts in recent years contributed to the higher tally. The low headcount in transitional kindergarten classrooms also helped drop the student-to-teacher ratio.
• The area has a slightly lower student-to-teacher ratio than the statewide figure.

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School districts in the Sacramento region have been on a hiring spree in recent years, adding hundreds of teachers and significantly reducing student-to-teacher ratios.

The number of public K-12 teachers in the four-county area grew by about 1,900, or 11%, from the 2019-20 school year to the 2025-26 school year, even as student enrollment figures barely budged.

As a result, the student-to-teacher ratio in the region fell from 22.2 to 20.1 students per teacher, a 9% decline. 

The rise in teachers was sharpest in elementary schools, but teacher ranks also grew in secondary schools.

Local school leaders said the increase in teachers has allowed for more individualized student instruction. 

“Smaller class sizes also have the potential to make the work more sustainable for teachers,” said San Juan Unified spokesperson Raj Rai, “reducing employee turnover and fostering instructional continuity.”

Statewide, the number of teachers grew by about 3%, though the number of students shrunk by a larger amount, pushing student-to-teacher ratios lower. The Sacramento region continues to have a slightly lower student-to-teacher ratio than California as a whole.

A few things explain the local trend.

Transitional kindergarten bump

The state required all school districts to offer transitional kindergarten by 2025-26. During the multi-year rollout, local districts hired scores of teachers. Transitional kindergarten classes generally have fewer students than other classes, which further bumped the number of teacher hires.

Second, many school districts used additional funding approved after the COVID-19 pandemic to hire more teachers and reduce class sizes.

Elk Grove Unified used post-pandemic funding to hire “academic intervention teachers” for all of its elementary schools. These teachers work closely with students who may be struggling in class.

“Sometimes that means that we need a teacher to pull the student and do some extra supplemental support, largely around literacy,” said Melissa Pascoa, a program specialist in human resources and equity at Elk Grove Unified.

At San Juan Unified, leaders used state funds to reduce class sizes at eight schools with the highest need, largely based on the number of English learners, socioeconomically disadvantaged students and students in foster care, Rai said.

California voters passed Proposition 28 in 2022, guaranteeing about $1 billion in additional funding annually to support music and arts education, which led to the hiring of many new teachers.

Elk Grove Unified added about 30 new visual and performing arts teaching positions to elementary schools across the district, including theater and dance teachers.

“That’s been pretty cool because traditionally you might have an art docent or maybe a music teacher at a site, but we’ve been able to look at having teachers from other domains work with elementary as well,” Pascoa said.

The greatest increase in new teachers came at Twin Rivers Unified, which serves northern Sacramento County. The district saw its student-to-teacher ratio plummet from about 27 students per teacher in 2019-20 to 19 in 2025-26.

District spokesperson Zenobia Gerald said Twin Rivers has strengthened its teacher pipeline over the last few years by partnering with universities and the county office of education.

“We’ve also been intentional about supporting newer teachers by pairing them with experienced teachers who can mentor and support them,” she said.

Finding so many new teachers has been a challenge, Pascoa and others said. For instance, after Prop. 28 passed, “filling those positions is tricky because you have to have very specific credentialing to be able to to work with those populations and in those disciplines,” she said. “And so we didn’t necessarily fill all 30 right away.”

Elk Grove Unified and other school districts continue to largely hire teachers who took a traditional pathway through local colleges like Sacramento State. But districts are also mentoring classified staff to become teachers and allowing would-be teachers to take alternative paths into the classroom, such as internships and teacher residencies, especially for hard-to-fill jobs like special education.

It’s not clear if districts will keep rapidly adding teachers. The dash to prepare for full transitional kindergarten implementation has largely finished; many Prop. 28 teachers are already on board and post-pandemic funding is drying up. That said, the region is still adding people faster than many other parts of the state.

“From where I sit, working with human resources, working in talent acquisition, I have not gotten any charge to hold on heavily recruiting,” Pascoa said.