LEWISTON — Lewiston schools have 43 vacancies ahead of the new school year, Superintendent Jake Langlais said Monday during a School Committee meeting.

The number includes vacancies for certified professionals. “This could be a teacher, it could be a school counselor, it could be a clinician, anybody under that CPE (Certified in Professional Education) contract,” Langlais added.

Giving a breakdown of the vacant positions, Langlais said staffing was “much better” compared to the last year.

Twenty of the 43 vacancies are for special education positions.

“(The current number of vacancies) is, I’d say, less than half of last year’s vacancies,” Langlais said. “That’s not counting other reductions that were made in the budget process, but also includes adding positions for the new programs that we’re bringing back in-house.”

The school department is still hiring for educational technology (ed tech) specialists. “We have a lot of ed tech (positions) that are still out there unfilled, so we’re asking the public, if you wanna be an ed tech, let’s talk,” Langlais said.

“You have a little bit of movement but just think that we cut vacant positions, (and then) we added programming,” Langlais continued. “We’re pretty optimistic about this number in comparison to where we were last year and we still have a couple weeks before school gets going.”

Enrollment numbers will be finalized in the coming weeks, as some students are still onboarding.

“We have over 5,700 students,” Langlais said. “5,701 actually.”

Langlais noted that the number includes some recent graduates. “There are some items that need to be cleaned up that time of year when we roll over from last year to this year,” Langlais clarified. “But students we serve here locally, we’re over 5,100 and that doesn’t include kids that we send to outplacements. So, still a big number, still growing.”

“Kindergarten and pre-k students continue to enroll, continue to be screened and the the reason they’re not necessarily all counted in this number is because until we have all their paperwork and everything with their registration settled, they don’t actually roll into the number,” Assistant Superintendent Karen Paquette added.