South Carolina Requested $13 Million to Bring CTE to Rural Classrooms -- and CTE Is Also a Big Part of the Teacher Shortage It Is Trying to Fix

South Carolina's CTE system faces a structural tension that its 2025 budget requests make visible: the state wants to expand career pathways into rural districts that currently lack them, while simultaneously trying to find enough CTE teachers to staff the programs that already exist. Both problems are real and both show up in Superintendent Weaver's priorities.

The CTE Rural Renaissance program, budgeted at $13 million in the SCDE's 2025 request to the General Assembly, aims to create and expand career programming in districts identified by the department as underserved. Key components include mobile CTE equipment labs -- trailers configured for welding, HVAC, construction, or healthcare instruction that can rotate between school sites -- and adaptive pathway development designed to reach students in areas where population density does not support building a full-time CTE center. Weaver framed the investment explicitly in workforce terms: the program would "empower students, our state's greatest resource, with the opportunity to fill high paying jobs or continue their education while demonstrating to businesses and employers that South Carolina's workforce is ready."

The teacher shortage dimension complicates the expansion picture. South Carolina's Department of Education designated all CTE certification fields as Critical Need Subject Areas for 2024-25 -- a formal determination based on the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement (CERRA) Annual Supply and Demand Survey. Health Science, Agriculture Education, and Industrial Technology Education are among the most acutely affected specific fields. The state's broader K-12 unfilled position count reached 1,613 at the start of the 2023-24 school year, more than double the 699 openings three years prior.

For students in South Carolina's Education and Training pathway -- the CTE program that prepares future teachers and childcare professionals -- this context shapes the career landscape directly. Elementary teachers in South Carolina earn a median of $59,370, and the state recently extended its teacher salary schedule to 28 years of experience and set a $47,000 minimum starting salary. The START Report released in 2025 proposed expanding teacher apprenticeships specifically to help aspiring educators gain experience without the financial barriers of unpaid student teaching. Preschool teachers in the state earn $29,040, with the occupation growing at 3.6% nationally. Teacher assistants and paraprofessionals reach $48,940 in South Carolina.

The Education and Training pathway's Child Development Associate credential and Early Childhood Professional Certificate are among the faster pathways to employment in a state that simultaneously needs more teachers, more childcare workers, and more CTE instructors at every level. The Rural Renaissance initiative, if funded, would bring more students into pathways that lead to those careers -- including, eventually, the CTE classrooms themselves. Whether the state solves the chicken-and-egg problem of expanding CTE while short of CTE teachers depends significantly on whether programs like teacher apprenticeship, tuition incentives, and rural access initiatives can move fast enough to build the next generation of educators from within the current CTE student population.