Gilroy
– The Gilroy Unified School District hired 60 new teachers for
the current school year, and after giving more attention to how
teachers are evaluated, it has high hopes the new hires will stick
around.
Gilroy – The Gilroy Unified School District hired 60 new teachers for the current school year, and after giving more attention to how teachers are evaluated, it has high hopes the new hires will stick around.
Linda Piceno, GUSD’s assistant superintendent of human resources, gave GUSD board members an update Thursday on how the district prepared for recruitment and hiring for the 2004-05 school year.
“This is the best group of new teachers we’ve had this year,” Piceno said.
A comprehensive evaluation process would be a step in the right direction, said district officials and union leaders.
Beginning late last spring and continuing through the summer, the district and the Gilroy Teachers Association have been discussing a key element of teacher retention: the formal evaluation process. Evaluations have come under glaring scrutiny in light of the very public dismissal of Gilroy High School English teacher Kristen Porter, who was let go in March after being told she was not a “good fit” for the district.
Now, the district has focused more of its attention not only on recruiting and hiring good teachers, but also on retaining them and improving the evaluation process.
Prior to hiring the 60 new full- and part-time teachers, district staff attended 10 recruitment fairs, including fairs at University of California at Santa Cruz, California League of Middle Schools and California State University at Los Angeles. The district also held and thus attended its own recruitment fair for middle and high school teachers.
The district chose which fairs to attend based on geographic location as well as how many candidates from each university had graduated with credentials. The 24 new hires who came from a variety of fairs all graduated from universities in Northern California, Piceno said.
A more bountiful recruitment resource – which resulted in 36 hires – was a nationwide education job Web site that posts vacancies and recruitment events.
Now that the teachers have been hired, it remains to be seen if and how the new formal evaluation process will affect teacher retention.
Teachers association President Michelle Nelson said the association and the district have spent countless hours discussing evaluations, and there is one overriding conclusion: It is the administration’s job to conduct evaluations properly, and although the district has made that commitment at the district office level, it often does not translate to real implementation, Nelson said.
“Teachers need to know: ‘What am I doing correctly? What am I not doing correctly? If I’m not doing something correctly, what can I do to fix it?’ People were caught by surprise, and there shouldn’t be surprises,” said Nelson, referring to the Porter situation. “We’ve always talked about the problem of surprises. That’s nothing new. But since it’s become a public issue, there’s been more serious attempts to make the process work.”
The association and the district currently are in talks concerning the language specifying evaluation procedures, Nelson said. Hopefully, a tentative agreement regarding evaluations, as well as safety issues and money, will be reached next month, she said. It then will go to the teachers for a vote and to the board for final approval.
GUSD Superintendent Edwin Diaz said the evaluation process has improved – and continues to improve – since the district and the association have been discussing the issue. Now, for example, evaluations are more directly linked to teacher performance standards, which are the teacher performance standards for the state of California, Diaz said.
Additionally, there is a higher, more strictly enforced expectation that administrators be in the classroom to observe teacher instruction, he said.
“Training to implement new procedures is an ongoing process that is much improved over what we’ve had in the past,” he said. “Last year, we didn’t do nearly the amount of training we’re doing now.”
Although it’s been a long road toward agreement, Nelson said she’s optimistic about the future.
“There’s already been a shift, a change of attitude in the administration, that they know they need to work on this,” she said. “We’ve had some progress.”
While negotiations were under way, between March and August, the district conducted a total of 195 interviews for elementary, middle school and high school positions. The 60 newly hired positions filled district vacancies that were created by a variety of reasons, including leaves of absence, retirements, resignations and district growth, Piceno said.
Five of the new hires are former district teachers, and six are former students.
For the 2003-04 and 2002-03 school years, the district hired 62 and 65 new teachers, respectively.
The average year of experience of the newly hired elementary teachers is about 2.6 years, Piceno said. Of the 20 elementary teachers hired this year, 18 have credentials. The other two have emergency permits, meaning they do not have credentials but do have a degree in the area they’re going to teach, and they’re enrolled in credential programs. A total of 11 emergency permit teachers were hired for this year.
At the secondary level – sixth grade and above – the district hired 31 classroom teachers. For the middle schools, one teacher was hired for English only, two were hired for English and social studies, four each for math and science, one for P.E. and two for alternative education. The average year of experience for the newly hired secondary teachers is about 4.4 years.
At the high school, seven teachers were hired for English, four for math, two for science and two for social studies.
The district also hired an academic coordinator and a counselor who are shared between middle schools and the high school.
The process of hiring a teacher entails several different stages. First is the paper screening or application review, which examines work experience, background information and “red flags,” such as if the teacher has worked in five different districts over five different years – especially if the districts geographically are far apart, Piceno said. Other considerations include specialized training, extracurricular activities and experience teaching honors classes.
Although experience certainly is considered, it isn’t always the ultimate factor in whether a teacher is hired, Piceno said.
“There’s a misconception that résumés of teachers with a lot of experience are at the bottom of the pile, because green teachers with only one or two years of experience won’t cost as much to hire,” she said. “But that’s absolutely false.”
Board Trustee John Gurich agreed, saying although a teacher with 18 or 20 years of experience is valued in the district, new teachers might have more creative, fresh ideas and perhaps would better relate to their students because they’re closer to them in age.
“The key here is balance,” Piceno said. “Neither having all veterans nor all new teachers is desirable.”
Of the 195 interviews the GUSD conducted March through August:
119 were candidates for elementary positions
31 were candidates for middle school positions
45 were candidates for high school positions
Of the 60 full- and part-time teachers GUSD hired for vacancies:
20 were elementary teachers
13 were middle school teachers
17 were secondary teachers
6 were special education teachers
2 were community day school teachers
1 counselor
1 academic coordinator
