Salina Journal
The question was one commonly asked of people applying to be teachers in western Kansas: How well would they adapt to living in a tiny, rural community, miles from a major highway and maybe a few hours from a major shopping center.
The answer, however, wasn't typical -- nor was the applicant or even the interview,
The interview at the Smoky Hill Education Service Center was via Web conferencing, with a job-seeker in the Philippines -- about as far away from Salina as it's possible to get.
The applicant's answer: Living in a town a ways off the beaten path in western Kansas would be several steps up from a previous teaching position in the bush in Nigeria, where home was a mud hut with a thatch roof and a dirt floor.
Meanwhile, across Salina that same week, a Salina South High School chemistry teacher was reviewing a plan for a unit on forensic science -- a plan drawn up by a high school junior who's hoping to become a chemistry teacher herself someday and is taking a new high school class to prepare for that career.
Those extremes -- looking halfway around the world and to their own students -- show just how far schools are willing to go to address a growing shortage of teachers.
Picking from thousands
Ten years ago, when districts such as Salina were getting thousands of applications for its teaching vacancies each year, the balance of power clearly favored those doing the hiring.
Back then, "You could pretty much say 'We're an 8 to 5, Monday through Friday organization,' " said A.J. D'Angelo, the district's executive director of human resources. Applicants wanting job interviews pretty much had to make that schedule work.
But today, as the number of applicants has shrunk dramatically -- the district had just 309 applications for close to 100 openings the past school year, an 80 percent drop in just four years -- districts are having to do just about anything they can.
That can include meeting with applicants when it's convenient for the applicant, D'Angelo said, whether that's some time over spring break or even at 10 p.m. on a Sunday when a job-seeker is passing through Salina on the way back from a ski weekend.
The situation is made even worse as the teachers that were part of the baby boom generation reach retirement age; right now, D'Angelo said, 83 of the district's 756 teachers -- or more than 10 percent -- are eligible to retire, with another dozen or so hitting that threshold each year.
Worse in small districts
The situation can be even worse in smaller school districts, such as Hope, where Superintendent Renae Hickert has had an opening for a math teacher for the entire school year.
"We've essentially been using Band-Aids," Hickert said, explaining that for the fall semester, the school used a combination of a half-time substitute, plus various online and distance-learning tools to fill in gaps.
This spring, she said, the district hired a long-term substitute, "and basically all we're doing is preparing for the state assessments."
She said it's not the best situation, but given federal requirements that schools meet "adequate yearly progress" goals as part of the No Child Left Behind law, that's got to be the priority.
"We have a couple of leads now, but we're fearful of getting our hopes up," she said. The district has gone outside the usual venues to advertise its math vacancy, even placing ads in various agricultural publications, she said.
"It's frustrating," Hickert said. "Every adjective you can think of, we've thought of."
The situation has prompted her high school principal, Ethan Gruen, to suggest that the shortage of teachers might force districts to consolidate long before a lack of students does.
Only going to get worse
So far, the Salina district hasn't had the problems to the extent some districts have; the current school year opened with three vacancies, but Superintendent Rob Winter predicts it will get worse before it gets better.
"We haven't yet gotten to the point where we haven't been able to find people," he said. "But that day's coming."
He likens how districts have been coping to the practice of deferred maintenance, which only really puts off the problem to the future, when it will be worse.
"You bump up class sizes a little, have a teacher giving up a planning period so you can have a physics class," he said. "We, schools in general, have always managed to do that -- and not conveyed the severity of the situation."
But, he continued, there will be a "tipping point" beyond which such patches won't work, and some classes will simply go untaught.
Changing recruiting
In the meantime, districts are trying a variety of other strategies, including more out-of-state recruiting.
The district is also working to recruit student teachers teaching in the district, including in the past couple of years scheduling dinners and interviews with those college students twice a year, Winter said.
"We're trying to keep those good student teachers and ink them before they put themselves on the market," Winter said.
The district has also done some "spec hiring," Winter said. "We're hiring for some positions, even if we don't have a vacancy right now."
For example, he said, if the district doesn't have a known opening for a high school math teacher, but finds someone who wants to come to Salina, they're likely to get hired anyway.
"When you have 750 staff, and hire about 70 people a year, you'll find a spot," Winter said.
The district has also started tracking education majors, and contacting them even before they start their senior years, Winter said, and there's a focus on students who are from Salina and so are already familiar with the schools and the town.
Giving students a LIFT
To encourage local young people to go into teaching the Salina Education Foundation several years ago started the Loan Initiative for Future Teachers program, usually known by its acronym LIFT.
The privately funded program offers loans of up to $5,000 a year for college students from Saline County who are planning on teaching careers, and students who return to Salina or Saline County schools to teach can have those loans forgiven.
The program, now in its third year, added a new student in January, and named three new graduating seniors as recipients this past week.
In addition, said education foundation director Pam McIntyre. two early recipients will be graduating this spring, and will be in Salina schools this fall. Kaysie Rowson, the first LIFT recipient, is to teach math at Salina South Middle School; Darcy Bartz has yet to be assigned.
Between those coming in and graduating, McIntyre said, LIFT will have five students in the program in January; the eventual goal is to have 10 in the program at a time.
"We're seeing more interest now from graduating seniors, and that's exciting," McIntyre said.
For years longer than it's had the LIFT program the education foundation has also sponsored individual classroom grants, helping teachers buy materials for special class projects they otherwise either couldn't afford through the school budget -- or would have to pay for themselves.
In part, McIntyre said, those classroom grants are a way to help keep teachers from leaving the profession, because they help provide students and teachers with interesting and unique opportunities.
"I've had teachers tell me it's a great retention tool," McIntyre said. "We're committed to having the best teachers we can, and supporting them."
Hire 'em, keep 'em
That's the second part of the problem -- keeping teachers once they've been hired.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, about a third of teachers quit within their first three years in the classroom.
Those first few years can be frustrating ones, said Candice Hill, in her second year of teaching English at Salina Central High School.
"It has gotten easier in my second year," Hill said. She's kept up with many of her college classmates, and the frustrations of the profession are a common topic.
"One friend in Arkansas doesn't feel like she's backed by the administration, so she's going in to counseling," she said.
Hill said she doesn't feel that at Central, however.
"(Assistant principal) Linn Exline will come in here and sit in on classes, and tell me what I'm doing right, and what didn't work," Hill said. "It's very helpful."
And, she said, "the faculty is all very helpful," and she feels free to ask other teachers for advice whenever she wants.
More formally, schools have mentoring programs, pairing a new teacher with an experienced one who can help guide them through that first year. The district also has new teachers report for work a week earlier in the fall, so they can go through an orientation and learn about school policies.
Hill described that as "more busy work, more to do, than a real help," but added she's pleased that school administrators had taken that criticism seriously, and were changing the program to make it more effective.
Pay matters
The frustration Hill didn't mention until asked was the profession's low pay.
In a survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, teachers ranked pay and benefits fourth among reasons for quitting, below factors such as lack of planning time, and class sizes being too big. Closely following low pay were student behavior and lack of influence in their school.
"There's a decline in student work ethic," said Hill, who's about as far removed from the "got off my lawn" generation as it's possible to be. "You give them an assignment, and you get maybe two of them back."
"I do feel I've made a difference, and I do strive to reach everybody," she continued. "But then there's one kid who won't change, and that's frustrating."
Additionally, she -- and all new teachers -- are operating under a conditional license: they have to not only teach their classes, but document what they're doing for two years in order to get a full license.
The Kansas Department of Education describes the Kansas Performance Assessment this way: "Teachers must demonstrate the ability to meet the state's teaching standards. They provide details about their classroom setting; set learning goals and objectives for a topic they plan to teach; devise and implement instructional and assessment plans. They also describe the learning environment in the classroom and write reflections about their teaching of the unit."
"I think I could do more in the first couple years if not for all the paperwork, like KPA," Hill said.
As for pay, "it's not that important, I've never been rich," she said. "I do think for people with families, it would be really tough."
"Pay isn't the top concern, but it does help," said Winter, who's familiar with surveys where teachers rank pay several places down on their list of concerns.
Winter noted that the $56 a student in new money the district is scheduled to receive from the state for the 2009-10 school year will total about $2 million in new funds. That's enough to give district employees about a 3 percent raise, once increases in fuel, utilities and other costs are accounted for.
And, he said, "we've increased what teachers need to do, but not all the support that needs to go with it," such as that additional planning time.
"We're doing more with less," Winter said, "and with a different clientele, and there's issues of parent and guardian involvement. Education looks decidedly different today than it did 25 years ago."
D'Angelo, however, thinks raising pay is needed, though for indirect reasons.
"For many years, I didn't think that," he said. "But in our society, the stature of a field is related to the compensation."
n Reporter Mike Strand can be reached at 822-1418 or by e-mail at mstrand@salina.com.
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