Nearly half of the public schools across the United States are hiring, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.

Rowan University is hoping to help fill that void with students who are getting ready to graduate. The school held a recruitment event on Thursday.

“This is probably one of the biggest hiring years we’ve had in quite some time,” says Elizabeth Scott, director of human resources at the Burlington Township School District.

Burlington is one of 80 school districts that was represented at the Education Expo at Rowan University hoping to fill vacancies.

“We have been recruiting heavily and we still haven’t been able to fill all our positions. So it’s my hope today that I’ll be able to find some of those hard-to-find certifications,” Scott says.

School districts from as far away as Virginia came to the expo.

"We have a number of teachers who have retired, so in addition to teacher shortages they were facing, it's been exacerbated by the pandemic and people are leaving the field and we need to build that pipeline,” says Gaetane Jean-Marie, dean of Rowan University College of Education.

News 12 New Jersey spoke to some Rowan seniors who plan to become teachers about the lessons they learned during the pandemic that they plan to take with them in their careers.

"We have to put a major emphasis on social and emotional learning and development. Things such as the ‘Invisible Backpack Theory’ such as we don't necessarily know what's going on in our students’ lives at home and we have to be able to accommodate for that and we have to be able to provide the necessary resources and instruction,” says senior Frank Gurcsik.

"As a teacher, there's a lot of changes always ongoing and I think that it's important to know how to adjust, know how to differentiate and just know how to honestly just be there through the changes for students that they'll experience every day,” says senior Nicole Cocco.

Rowan says they're getting ready to graduate 500 education students in both undergrad and graduate programs.