More than 95 percent of newly licensed teachers are still looking for work due to a shortage of openings prompted by budget constraints, local teachers unions said Tuesday.

According to the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Association, only 38 of the 990 people who passed the state elementary-school teacher certification exam this year have found teaching posts.

This means that more than 1,000 of the teachers that qualified in the last two years are still unemployed, the KFTA said.

In most years 30-40 percent of newly certified teachers are assigned to work at elementary schools before the first semester begins. Last year, 453 of 993 new teachers found jobs before March.

The shortage of openings is thought to have been caused by local education offices cutting or eliminating budgets for retiring teachers.

Some, such as Daegu Metropolitan Office of Education initially planned to spend no money on retirees.

The Daegu office later earmarked 6.6 billion won ($6.1 million) for them, which amounted to about 31 percent of last year’s budget.

The budget cut had limited the government’s ability to compensate teachers that are leaving.

Korean law requires the government to issue a severance payment to retiring teachers that have served for more than 20 years.

As a result, fewer teachers were allowed to retire.

In the case of Daegu, 75 of the 248 teachers who applied to retire in the first semester were able to do so.

The figure is considerably less than the 200 retirees who left during the first semester of 2013.

In Gyeonggi Province, only 1 in 5 applicants were granted retirement by the education office.

The result has been fewer openings for new teachers.

Teachers are split over why the authorities are spending so little on retirees.

The KFTA said that too much of the budget had been used to pay for the free school lunch program, which is to be expanded to all middle and elementary school students this year.

It claimed that budget for the free lunch program had increased sharply since it was introduced in July 2012, while the allocations for other school facilities like labs and bathrooms had decreased.

The Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union, however, said the free lunch program only increased by 30 billion won. This is only a small part of the increase in the overall budget, the KTU said.

The KTU instead placed the blame on free child care and an educational program for preschoolers called “nuri,” one of President Park Geun-hye’s key educational policies.

The KTU said that this year’s budget for the nuri program had increased by 315 billion won to 547.3 billion won. This, the KTU pointed out, is more than the total amount of central government subsidies for elementary, middle, and high schools, which is 535.9 billion won.

By Yoon Min-sik (minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com)