By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Earning tenure in the Princeton school district is harder than it was in past years, with the school board on Tuesday tenuring around two-thirds of the teachers and other employees who were hired together at the same time., Assistant Superintendent of Schools Lewis Goldstein said this week that the board has a “more rigorous and thorough” tenure and reappointment process. He said that of the roughly 40 employees hired in tenure-track jobs four years ago, 25 of them got tenure. The rest left the district, either because they resigned, were not rehired or quit for other reasons., The 25 employees were part of a long list of staff reappointments that the board approved for the upcoming school year., “The most important work that we do as administrators and as a board is to ensure that there are great teachers in front of our kids, in the classrooms,” Superintendent of Schools Stephen C. Cochrane said at the meeting., Later, school board President Patrick Sullivan touched on what he called the “very most important” consideration for deciding whether to grant teachers tenure., Sullivan said “our standards, in terms of weighing teachers in the future for potential tenure, is going to be first and foremost about their interactions with the children.”, School districts in New Jersey used to grant tenure after an employee worked three years in a school district. But in 2012, the state added an extra year, in order for school employees to get that job security., “The true indicator regarding the tenure rate is by looking at the number of eligible teaching and professional staff that started four years ago and how many earned tenure four years later, given the new change in the tenure law from three to four years,” Goldstein said.
