GILROY
– For children attending Gilroy public schools, the chances they
will be taught by a teacher with full credentials are improving
each year.
By Lori Stuenkel
GILROY – For children attending Gilroy public schools, the chances they will be taught by a teacher with full credentials are improving each year.
The number of fully credentialed teachers in Gilroy Unified School District is about 80 percent and has been increasing for three or four years, with more new hires having previous teaching experience, said Linda Piceno, assistant superintendent of human resources.
The emphasis on credentialed and experienced teachers is twofold: to fulfill the federal requirement for increasing the amount of highly qualified teachers and to fulfill the district goal of recruiting and retaining quality teachers.
“It’s competitive; everybody’s competing for the same pool of teachers,” Superintendent Edwin Diaz said.
But Gilroy was not immune to budget cuts, either. For the first time in as many as 12 years, teachers were laid off, Piceno said. In March, 33 teachers were laid off, all of them holding emergency permits. There were about 35 emergency permit teachers not affected by the layoffs.
This fall, GUSD hired 55 full-time teachers, replacing those who went on pregnancy or maternity leave, retired or resigned. Of those new hires, Piceno estimated that fewer than 25 percent were non-credentialed. In 2001, 45 of the 92 new teachers hired by GUSD were non-credentialed. In 2002, those numbers improved to 24 of 80 new teachers not holding credentials.
The rest hold emergency permits and were mostly hired to teach subjects with a high demand for teachers.
“Fully credentialed math, science, special education teachers are very hard to find,” Piceno said. “They are so difficult to find that emergency permit teachers will stay on.”
A few of those emergency permit teachers were re-hired from 2002-03, and two are currently in the process of becoming fully credentialed, Piceno said.
An emergency permit is the lowest level of credential. To obtain the permit, a teacher must take the California Basic Educational Skills Test, which assesses reading, writing and mathematics skills. New emergency permit teachers usually do not have any teaching experience, but there are some who have been with the district for several years.
More teachers with credentials in the district translates to better instruction for students, Piceno said.
“Credentialed teachers come more prepared than someone who hasn’t been through a credential program,” said Michelle Nelson, president of the Gilroy Teachers Association. “The more experienced the teacher, the better the instruction.”
Gilroy Unified officials said that credentialed teachers often are more able than emergency permit teachers to focus entirely on student instruction because those without credentials are usually going to school as well.
“(School) really pulls them in terms of their time, so it’s all the more reason the district would want fully credentialed teachers,” Piceno said.
The amount of experience a teacher has often is the deciding factor when the district is hiring, Diaz said.
“Our first priority is to hire people who are credentialed and then people who have the right attributes and characteristics to be good teachers,” he said.
The emphasis on credentialed and experienced teachers does not come without a price, although the district said it does not consider pay a factor in hiring. A first-year, fully credentialed teacher with a four-year degree earns $37,978 per year, while a teacher with a degree but no credentials earns $35,687 – a difference of about $2,300. To teach in California, all teachers must have a bachelor’s degree.
“There is a misperception that when the district hires, with all things being equal, that if someone doesn’t have a credential and somebody does … that we would look at the cheaper teacher,” Piceno said. “We look for the best quality teacher.”
Recent state budget cuts may have helped GUSD attract teachers. With more districts forced to lay off teachers, and the teacher shortage easing, Gilroy saw a more highly qualified pool of applicants for its fall teaching positions.
“We were lucky to get such high-quality teachers,” said Gene Sakahara, part-time recruitment administrator. “There was such a (teacher) shortage and students in colleges were encouraged to go into teaching. Now they have finished their courses and in the meantime we have a high unemployment rate and people from other fields have gone into the teaching profession as well.”
The majority of those applicants were fully credentialed, with many having one or more years of experience under their belts.
“Other districts laid off 100-plus,” Piceno said. “There were only one or two schools in the county with increased enrollment (including Gilroy). The demand in other parts of the county is a lot less.”
Gilroy Unified is on track to meet the federal government’s time frame for increasing the number of “highly qualified” teachers in core academic subjects. Under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, 100 percent of teachers in core subjects must be highly qualified by the 2005-06 school year.
A highly qualified teacher is defined as fully credentialed or in an approved intern program for less than three years. The teacher must also prove to be competent in their subject matter and grade level.
“They have experience preparing lessons and managing a class,” Nelson said.
While experienced teachers may sometimes need to support those without experience, they do not experience too much of an impact.
“I don’t single (non-credentialed teachers) out,” said Carolyn Mendoza, a first-grade teacher at Glen View Elementary School. “We’re all one family.”
She said that specialized training at Gilroy schools, such as training teachers to work with English learners, prepares newer teachers as well as those who have experience.
