Bilingual education is the fastest-growing department in the Hudson Valley’s Suffern Central School District — but hiring for it is tough.

It took three years for the district to find a bilingual math teacher, and a job opening for a Spanish-speaking psychologist posted last month hasn’t elicited a single application, district officials said. The need for the psychologist emerged after nearly 100 multilingual students enrolled this summer.

“When we sat down as a district in the spring planning for this, our numbers were completely different than our prediction,” said Patricia Balbuena-Rivera, Suffern’s multilingual education director.

School districts across New York state have long struggled to find qualified bilingual education teachers, and the problem has worsened over the past two years, as hundreds of thousands of new immigrants and asylum seekers arrive.

Election Day is less than three weeks away, and while New York isn’t one of the seven swing states that will likely decide the presidential election, there are still a number of important issues for Empire State residents to vote on.

Here’s New York Focus’s guide to what’s at stake and why it all matters.