School districts nationwide are turning to extraordinary measures in a desperate effort to get enough teachers in classrooms before the academic year kicks off, Axios Local reporters found.

• Why it matters: The teacher shortage — driven by burnout, low pay and ever-increasing demands — is a slow-motion crisis that's happening everywhere, and there's no easy way to reverse it.

💰 Financial incentives are growing: Des Moines Public Schools is offering a $50,000 incentive to teachers, nurses and administrators who are nearing retirement to stay with the district through the 2022-2023 school year. At least 58 have taken the offer so far, according to records obtained by Axios.

• Dallas Independent School District set aside $51 million for salary increases and $52 million for retention bonuses for 2022-2023. The district's starting pay for newly hired teachers is now $60,000; the minimum wage for staff is $15. That kicked off a recruiting arms race among school districts in North Texas, which has a population boom.

🌞 Sunbelt states are making exceptions to licensing requirements: The Florida Department of Education announced it would issue a temporary teaching certificate to veterans "who have not yet earned their bachelor's degree," based on a new law that took effect July 1.

• Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) signed legislation last month to allow people without a bachelor’s degree to start training to become teachers, and complete their training while also finishing their degree.

Between the lines: These are all stopgaps, not solutions.

• Axios' Jason Clayworth, Jeremy Duda, Ben Montgomery and Naheed Rajwani-Dharsi contributed to this report.

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A lawyer for former President Trump "signed a written statement in June asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at ... Mar-a-Lago ... had been returned to the government," the N.Y. Times' Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush report (subscription).

• Why it matters: The signed declaration, based on material the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago on Monday, "is a possible indication that Mr. Trump or his team were not fully forthcoming with federal investigators about the material."

Between the lines: The statement also could help explain why the Justice Department, in seeking the search warrant, cited a potential violation of a criminal statute related to obstruction, The Times notes.

Behind the scenes: Former national security adviser John Bolton told The Washington Post that Trump sometimes asked to keep highly classified visual aids, pictures, charts and graphs that augmented the President's Daily Brief (PDB), which he did not typically read.

• "People were nervous enough about his lack of concern for classification matters that the briefers typically said, 'Well, we need to take it back,'" Bolton said. "He’d usually give it back — but sometimes he wouldn’t give it back."

🕶️ What we're watching: The Post reports that after the search, Trump's allies began a hunt for new attorneys with more experience for the big, complex battle with the Justice Department that has just begun.

• "As the week progressed, Trump grew angrier, at times screaming profanities to advisers about the FBI," The Post added.

🔮 What's next: Two top House Democrats asked the Director of National Intelligence for a "damage assessment" after the Trump seizures.

• A classified briefing on the assessment’s progress was sought "as soon as possible" by House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney and Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, in a letter yesterday to DNI Avril Haines, Bloomberg reports.

Read the 3-page letter.

This graphic shows clearly and cleanly how America split:

• A new Pew Research Center survey on parties and partisanship (6,174 U.S. online respondents between June 27 and July 4) found that the proportion of people in each party with a very unfavorable view of the other has tripled over the past 28 years.

Read the report.

The continental United States set a record in July for overnight warmth.

• The average low temperature for the Lower 48 states in July was 63.6 degrees — beating the previous record, set in 2011, by a few hundredths of a degree, AP's Seth Borenstein reports.

NOAA says that's the hottest nightly average for any month in 128 years of record-keeping.

• July's nighttime low was more than 3 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average.

Context: For decades, climate scientists have said global warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas would make the world warmer.

👢 In Texas, the July daytime average high was over 100 degrees for the first time. The average nighttime temperature was 74.3 degrees.

• Go deeper: Global picture in July, by Axios' Andrew Freedman.

Tomorrow marks one year since the Taliban captured Kabul amid a chaotic U.S. withdrawal.

• The Taliban has remained in power with a promise, so far undelivered, to govern differently than it did before the American invasion in 2001, Axios' Aïda Amer writes.

These photos offer a glimpse at life in today's Afghanistan.

Above, a girl studies in a secret school at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan on July 25.

• Girls and young women have been deprived of education since the Taliban returned to power.

See more photos.

What takes four years to make and costs more than $20,000? A trash can in San Francisco.

• The $20,900 can is among several prototypes the city rolled out this summer as part of the city's long search for the perfect can, AP's Olga R. Rodriquez writes.

Why it matters: Overflowing trash cans are a common sight in San Francisco, along with sometimes-impassable sidewalks.

What's happening: Last month, the city deployed 15 custom-made trash cans and 11 off-the-shelf trash cans — with QR codes affixed, asking residents to fill out a survey.

Above is the priciest prototype, the Soft Square, which ran $20,900 for the test.

• The boxy stainless steel receptacle has openings for trash and for can and bottle recycling, and includes a foot pedal.

How it works: Officials say the current bins have too big a hole that allows for easy rummaging.

• The city's target cost for the new trash can, when mass-produced, is $2,000 to $3,000 apiece.

The city created an interactive map so residents can track and test the different designs.

• Three weeks after being unveiled, several of the cans have already been tagged with orange and white graffiti.

See all the cans.