A pause on visa interviews for international college students has also affected international teachers—a lifeline for districts facing persistent shortages of educators in areas like STEM and special education.
A growing number of districts rely on exchange programs to hire teachers from other countries, largely using J-1 cultural exchange visas, which allow educators to work in U.S. schools for up to five years, depending on renewal eligibility.
Interviews for those visas—which fall under programs promoting cultural and educational exchange—are among those that the Trump administration has paused while it revises screening requirements for applicants.
Advocacy organizations representing district leaders expect the pause to lift soon, and superintendents are hopeful that any backlogs in interviews that have accumulated in the meantime will not cause delays significant enough to interrupt their fall staffing plans.
But the uncertainty created by the pause highlights how federal decisions—even those made by agencies other than the U.S. Department of Education—can directly affect schools.
“The immigration process—our actual laws and all of the steps—is difficult to learn,” said George Shipley, superintendent of the Bison, S.D., district, who added that he “didn’t expect to know this much about the visa process” when he became an educator.
Three of the small, rural district’s 18 teachers are international exchange participants from the Philippines, and two of them rely on J-1 visas.
International teachers fill staffing gaps
That situation is not uncommon in South Dakota, where districts employ about 450 international teachers from countries like the Philippines, Colombia, and Spain, South Dakota News Watch reported in February.
It’s a strategy that’s increasingly common in other states, where international teachers make up for yawning shortfalls in local applicants and high rates of teacher turnover.
In Hawaii, 218 international teachers work in 55 schools “predominately in hard-to-staff locations and special education,” Superintendent Keith Hayashi told state lawmakers in February in testimony about a bill that would have created a special teaching license for international candidates.
“These educators are not simply filling positions; they are enriching our entire school community,” elementary school vice principal DeAnne Shibaoka told lawmakers. “Experienced teachers in their home countries, they bring a wealth of diverse perspectives, innovative teaching strategies, and a vibrant energy that ignites a spark in our classrooms.”
States including Texas and Florida also rely on international teachers, and many larger districts around the country recruit candidates from other countries to teach in increasingly popular language-immersion programs.
State Department says visa appointments will resume soon
That’s why groups like AASA, the School Superintendents Association, flagged concerns when Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a May 27 cable ordering U.S. embassies and consulates to stop scheduling new interviews for F-1 or J-1 visas while the agency updates its protocols to include more extensive social media vetting. Such interviews are necessary to obtain a new visa or to extend an existing one.
Many headlines about the decision focused on F-1 visas, which are used by international students attending U.S. colleges and universities. But the J-1 freeze affects a wide range of programs—including live-in au pairs, international summer camp counselors, and seasonal workers in tourist areas.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters June 4 that the agency expects to provide an update on the visa pause at the end of the week.
“I think once [the process] is back online, it will come back pretty quickly,” she said.
Because of such messages, AASA is less concerned that the pause will affect international teachers in the long-term, Government Affairs Manager Tara Thomas said Wednesday, but the organization continues to monitor the situation.
Rubio has also said the State Department plans to revoke visas for Chinese students studying in the United States. It’s unclear if that plan will also apply to Chinese exchange teachers with J-1 visas.
Teachers fear a chilling effect from immigration enforcement
Some international teachers fear that broader changes in immigration enforcement—and the uncertainty caused by those policy shifts—will have a chilling effect, discouraging their peers from applying for the roles.
Advocates for Filipino teachers working in Hawaii were alarmed when immigration officials raided a house shared by 10 international teachers in Maui on May 6, questioning them for more than an hour and refusing teachers’ requests to show them passports and visa documents, Honolulu Civil Beat reported. Agents did not make any arrests.
“This is definitely something that is not going to help,” Osa Tui Jr., president of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, told Civil Beat. “We’re very worried that it might happen again.”
In Hawaii, where 22 percent of students identify as Filipino, state officials have touted teacher-exchange programs as a way to expose students to teachers who share and value their culture.
Cultural learning is also important in South Dakota, where superintendents trade tips for navigating the immigration process, said Shipley, the Bison superintendent. Bison students even learn to cook traditional Filipino dishes in their family and consumer science classes.
He doesn’t believe the visa pause will affect his teachers. But, Shipley said, superintendents should structure teaching contracts so that they are contingent upon a teacher’s immigration approval, allowing the disrict to relist the position locally if candidates cannot obtain a visa.
But it is tough to fill some positions locally, and even one affected teacher would be a major loss for many rural districts, Shipley said. In Bison, a Filipino exchange teacher is responsible for all middle and high school math classes.
“For small districts, it’s a huge deal,” Shipley said. “If I don’t fill that math position, then I’m talking about 7th to 12th graders impacted. If I don’t fill that elementary position, I’ve got an entire grade that’s affected.”
