Hawaii needs to hire 1,600 teachers and is recruiting on the mainland for them.

Good news for SPAM fans and Don Ho enthusiasts: Hawaii needs to hire 1,600 teachers for the upcoming school year and has begun recruiting on the mainland United States for such personnel

Why? Because no one wants to teach in Hawaii.

It's true! Being a state made up of islands in the middle of an ocean limits the potential recruitment of future teachers just from a geographical sense, and paying teachers below the median national salary for the position doesn't much help matters. As a result, Hawaii often goes to the mainland United States to recruit more teachers every year.

Except that mainland recruitment often fails as well because of Hawaii's extremely high cost-of-living doesn't coincide well with being an underpaid teacher. Added into the mix of problems is that most recruits find themselves assigned to rural schools, which make up 16% of all schools on the islands.

So far Hawaii's recruiting efforts have focused on cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and, uh, Newark. One can only assume people might be so desperate to leave Newark they'll take anything available.

Corey Rosenlee, president of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, tells Hawaii News Now it's never getting better. "[Mainland recruits] say, 'I can't live here' and they leave and we have to go back and recruit, and this cycle just continually happens."

And you thought SPAM was an acquired taste. Turns out the whole state of Hawaii is.