School district takes new approach to recruit new teachers

It’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem.

Maricopa Unified School District has open positions and the money to pay them. The challenge is finding enough teachers to fill the positions.

With the passage of Proposition 123 in May’s Special Election, MUSD will have additional revenue in “inflation” funds. That could allow the hiring of 16 employees, including 13 teachers, which is part of the budget discussion slated for Wednesday’s meeting of the governing board.

“It’s going to be difficult to find 13 teachers for those positions,” Superintendent Steve Chestnut said during the May 25 board meeting. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. We’re working hard on it, but we have a large number of positions to fill. We have resignations that we have to fill. If we move forward on this, we’ll have these 13 positions to fill. It’s not going to be an easy task.”

For most schools, this is the hiring time of year. MUSD has been busily filling vacancies, but there are around 40 certified positions already needing qualified applicants.

“We currently are still recruiting for a variety of general education and special education positions,” said Tom Beckett, director of the Human Resources Department.

Beckett said the district is employing two new recruitment strategies this year.

One of those is offering a “finder’s fee.” The district will pay any non-administrative employee a stipend of $200 for finding a general education teacher that is hired and $500 for a special education teacher or service provider hired.

Also new this year, MUSD offers a relocation stipend of $2,000 for a highly qualified, out-of-state teacher hired after June 1 and $1,000 to a highly qualified, in-state teacher.

MUSD continues to offer a $2,000 signing bonus for highly qualified teachers in mathematics, science and special education. The district advertises on in-state and national job boards.

Teacher turnover in Arizona has been well documented in recent years. A 2014 report from Alliance for Excellent Education showed teacher attrition cost the United State up to $2.2 billion annually. In Arizona, that was $76 million.

That same year, the Arizona Department of Education reported a teacher retention rate of just 65 percent.

“When the state has defunded education for the last eight years, it makes it very difficult to attract people to the profession,” Chestnut said. “That’s kind of the bottom-line issue that we’re facing.”

The irony is, with a growing student population, MUSD wants more teachers. It has a budget override proposal on the November ballot, mainly to be able to hire more teachers to shrink class sizes. That would be 47 more positions to fill.

At Wednesday’s meeting, the board could approve a personnel list of 14 new employees, from a new dean of students at the high school to a part-time clerk.

The district office and every school except Butterfield Elementary have current openings.

Chestnut said Beckett had attended 10 job fairs in Arizona and four out of state in an effort to recruit more teachers.

“We’re really pulling out all the stops,” Chestnut said.

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