The toughest immediate challenge for the district will be to find an industrial arts teacher before classes begin.
By: Lea Kahn
When the district’s students walk through the schoolhouse doors next week, they will be greeted by a new middle school principal and 52 new teachers.
Increasing enrollments, an aging teaching staff and resignations have led to the hiring frenzy, said Gale Tapper, the school district’s director of personnel. The task has kept school district officials busy this summer, as they have filled a raft of openings, she said.
"The number of openings is much larger than we have ever experienced before," Mrs. Tapper said. She attributed it to an increasing number of retirements, plus resignations and the creation of 17 new teaching jobs.
"We went through a period about six or seven years ago when we had two or three retirements a year," she said. "In the past two years, it seems that number has grown to 15 or 18 retirements. We have a very experienced staff and they are at the point in their lives when they want to think about retiring."
Some of the younger teachers have resigned to accept teaching jobs in other districts or to return to school for graduate work, Mrs. Tapper said. Some teachers have resigned because of a spouse’s job transfer.
And, of course, there are the newly created teaching posts, she said. There are five new teaching jobs at Lawrence High School and five new first-grade teachers spread among the four elementary schools. Two Reading Recovery program teachers have been hired, plus one kindergarten teacher and a special education teacher.
Three pre-kindergarten staff positions a teacher, a speech therapist and an occupational therapist have been added to the roster. They will teach special needs students who had been sent out of the school district for education.
And now, at the last minute, the school district must find an industrial arts teacher for Lawrence High School, she said. The teacher resigned unexpectedly to take a job in another school district.
The industrial arts teaching vacancy will be hard to fill because there are very few candidates, Mrs. Tapper said. The school district is leaning toward holding the industrial arts teacher to the required 60-days notice of his intention to leave, she said.
Fewer people are going into education, with the exception of the field of elementary education, she said. Some students who might have been interested in teaching industrial arts have opted for high technology jobs. There are other opportunities for college students who might be technically oriented, she said.
The industrial arts program at the high school has been renamed the technology department, Mrs. Tapper said. The technology department offers courses in computer assisted architectural drawing, videography, photography, drafting and design.
Aside from the industrial arts teacher, the most difficult openings to fill have been those for Spanish and science teachers, Mrs. Tapper said. There were two openings for Spanish teachers at the elementary school level and one science teacher apiece at Lawrence Middle School and Lawrence High School.
Spanish teachers are much in demand because many school districts have opted to teach that language in the elementary grades, she said. The districts are trying to fulfill state educators’ requirements that every child shall learn a world language.
Hiring a science teacher has been difficult for many years because of a shortage that shows no signs of easing up, she said. Students who major in one of the sciences often opt for professions other than teaching, she said.
Guidance counselors also are becoming harder to find, Mrs. Tapper said. There is a growing need for guidance counselors at the same time that there are fewer people entering the field, she said. Increasing enrollment in a lot of school districts has created the need for guidance counselors, so all of the districts are vying for the same few candidates, she said.