Aliyya Swaby Photo
Joyner (pictured) pressed for a monthly update of vacancies.
Like other districts in the state, New Haven is short on math, special education and bilingual teachers needed to fill empty slots, according to a new report on staff vacancies.
Board of Education members received that report this week and brainstormed ways to increase retention and track school-level shortages.
The district’s Human Resources department agreed to provide members with an updated version of the report each month.
The information — and the problem — became public after newly elected board member Ed Joyner made a motion at the previous Board of Education meeting asking for a monthly update of staff vacancies across New Haven Public Schools. The board passed his proposal unanimously. He also asked that the board create a panel to hold exit interviews with people leaving the district, to get a better sense of how to increase retention.
The report presented this Monday’s meeting at L.W. Beecher School provides a snapshot of the positions that still needed to be permanently filled as of Jan. 20, 2016, and includes the school, funding source, reason for the vacancy, status of the position, and any associated change in salary.
Michael Crocco, director of the school district’s talent office, said a hiring manager is assigned to each vacant position, responsible for pulling together a team to ensure the hiring process is going forward.
Of 30 slots listed as vacant in the report, 16 are in positions designated shortage areas for schools across the state of Connecticut, according to the state Department of Education. Click here to read the full school district vacancy report.
Those shortage areas include bilingual education for all grades, special education for all grades, intermediate administrator, middle and high school math and science, library and media specialists, technology education for all grades, and middle and high school world languages.
The state has developed incentives for teachers working in shortage areas, such as a mortgage assistance program.
The report presented Monday did not include newly vacant positions listed on Superintendent Garth Harries’ personnel report dated Jan. 25. That report included three retirements, four resignations, one termination, and five school transfers. Two of the resignations were of science teachers at High School in the Community and Celentano Academy.
Darnell Goldson, another newly elected board member, said he worries about the number of vacancies after meeting the parent of a high school student who had not had one of her classes for an entire semester, because the teacher had not been replaced.
“A lot of children are not being fully educated,” he said.
He said he plans to ask district officials to keep a “running tab” of positions over the next few months, to give the public an idea of how long it takes for vacancies to be filled. “I just want to see the raw data,” he said.
At Monday night’s meeting, board member Mike Nast asked whether the district had thought about creative ways to attract more applicants to the positions in shortage: “Is there a way to pay more money? Or we bring back a physics PhD at Yale who might not be certified but makes more money?”
Superintendent Harries told the Independent that district leaders have had “preliminary conversations” about how to improve retention and fill vacancies more efficiently during the year. He said they might consider “prehiring” teachers in shortage areas, such as science and math, at the beginning of the year, when the pool is strong. Those prehired teachers could work as coaches, share teaching loads with established teachers or apprentice with teachers until a permanent teaching position opens up in a school.
“We wouldn’t absolutely need the teacher at the start of the year,” Harries said. “But we avoid running around mid year trying to tap the pool that’s still available.”
He said he would also consider going against state regulations to hire qualified teachers who have not passed the certification exam, since “certification doesn’t necessarily mean someone’s a good teacher.”
Harries has not yet spoken with board members about setting up a panel to hold exit interviews with departing teachers. But he said the board would discuss it during its next retreat.
The longest-held vacancy in the report is a music teacher position at Lincoln-Bassett School, empty since August 2014. A part-time instructor is currently holding the place of a full-time teacher, until the Praxis certification exam is passed, according to the report.
Half of the teachers in the report resigned, leaving open positions. Six transferred to other schools within the district.
Several notes next to specific positions mark them as “hard to fill” or “shortage area” that officials are working with a supervisor to fill.
Others showed potential options for filling the position. Administrative intern John Tarka was pitched to “possibly fill” the shoes of Nicholas Montano, assistant principal of Adult & Continuing Education, who received a salary of $132,043 before retiring.
Substitute teacher Shirley Gonzalez is filling in for a Spanish teacher who took a leave of absence from Ross-Woodward School September 2015. The position is not posted for applications, instead marked as a “hold.”
A first-grade teaching position at Troup Magnet School is being held until a long-term substitute gets certification.
Instead of finding a new third-grade teacher at West Rock Author’s Academy this fall, officials “dispersed students into the other grade 3 classrooms,” according to the note on the report.
A few years back, it seemed like so much of the focus was on how to make it easier for the district to fire teachers - i.e. increase standardized testing, tie teacher evaluations to student test scores, make test scores a large part of the evaluation, fire those who do not make the cut. Easy peezy when there's a dire recession and throngs of folks looking for jobs.
However, now that the economy has improved and the labor pool has more options, it seems the focus is shifting from firing teachers back to how to retain and attract new teachers to the district. Maybe if there weren't so much negative focus placed on the teaching profession and eviscerating its protections, here and elsewhere, then efforts to find bodies, credentialed or otherwise, to head classrooms wouldn't be as much of a challenge as it is today...