We held a regular board meeting on March 14th. You can view the meeting on YouTube here. As always, I encourage you to watch the meeting if you can.
Language Immersion Program
There was a good presentation about language immersion. As a former foreign language teacher, you won’t be surprised to hear that I believe these programs are great. I think Richland One does an especially good job of ensuring that this is a real choice for all families by providing transportation. The lack of transportation is the biggest hurdle for many families to access such programs. So, I applaud our district for getting this right.
Hiring New Administration-Level Folks
We hired a new COO and general counsel. I remain baffled at the board’s involvement in this process given how little information the administration provides. In hindsight, I probably should have abstained — not because of anything concerning the candidates themselves but because of our lack of information. I think we either need to be more substantively involved in the process or not at all. Our voting suggests we have more knowledge and involvement than we really do.
Teacher Turnover by School
A number of folks, especially teachers, have asked me for an update on this issue. So, here goes.
Around May of last year, I requested that the administration provide the board with last year’s teacher turnover rate for each school. I thought we needed that information generally, but especially as we voted on school administration transfers and hires throughout the summer. When I made this request, I assumed it would be readily available and something the district tracks yearly.
Sometime in July or August, the administration provided us with this document. First, because this does not provide the number of teachers who began the school year at each school, it is impossible to determine the turnover rate at any given school. More importantly, this document underrepresented the actual turnover—by a lot. “Contracts not signed” is not the same as teacher turnover, and, of course, the administration knew that when it provided this in response to my request. If a teacher indicates they are not returning to the district before contracts go out, they are not presented with a contract. For example, there is one school that lost 13 teachers last year. This document lists 2. And the overall number of teachers leaving their schools was about a third of the known teacher loss from last year. So, it didn’t take more than a glance at this document to realize it was not responsive and also not very useful.
In early 2023 someone submitted a FOIA request for last year’s teacher turnover for each school. The district responded that it “does not have documents which are responsive to your request.” I was stunned. This response was an acknowledgment that the document provided to the board in the summer didn’t provide this information requested. But more importantly, the district finally admitted that it wasn’t tracking this data. To me, that is inexcusable. Teacher turnover by school has to be one of the more important metrics to determine how any particular school is doing.
Finally, a few weeks ago, the district provided this document. This is getting closer though there are still problems. First, the administration still refuses to give the information needed to determine the turnover rate (i.e., a large school losing ten teachers is not the same as a small school losing ten teachers). Also, this document continues to undercount the turnover — albeit by far less than the initial document.
Given that school climate and school leadership drive teacher retention and recruitment as much or more than any other issue, it is beyond me how a district and the board have operated without this information.
We hear all the time that we are a “data-driven district,” and I even sometimes hear folks use the terms “qualitative” and “quantitive” in the same sentence. Yet we don’t seem to have a system to compile this basic information at the end of each school year so we have a sense of where we losing our largest numbers of teachers. And we don’t read the exit interviews to find out why those teachers left. I’ll bet we’d learn a lot from both of these pieces of data.