Consider This from NPR - To attract and retain teachers, some schools are getting creative

Episode Date: August 27, 2022

Across the country, some teachers are deciding not to return to the classroom this September. The pandemic didn't create the problem of teacher burnout, but it made a bad situation worse. Fed up with low pay, hampered by partisan politics intruding in the classroom, and shaken by the recent Uvalde shooting, many say they have reached their breaking point. Teacher vacancies have left school districts across the U.S. scrambling to find enough qualified faculty for the fall. In some areas, competition for teachers is fierce, and schools are finding creative ways to hold on to existing teachers and attract new talent.Host Don Gonyea speaks with John Kuhn, Superintendent of Mineral Wells Independent School District in Texas, about the bold changes he made to retain teachers.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org The teachers are, they're just feeling overwhelmed. And they're breaking down underneath it. I find people crying in the bathroom. That's Michael Reinhold. He coaches teachers in Davenport, Iowa. NPR spoke with him back in December during the Omicron surge.

These people are just breaking down under the pressures here because of how much responsibility they're expected to handle. We've been checking with teachers and school administrators across the country throughout the pandemic. They teach different subjects and grades. Some are new, some are veterans. But one thing they all have in common, the stress, fear and frustrations of the past few years have made a tough job even harder and pushed some of them to their limit. This year has been tough. I have thought many times, you know, not even do I want to do this because I do. I love it. But can I? In June, we talked to Tiki Boye Logan. She teaches fourth grade in Rowlett, Texas. She said she hoped school

administrators across the country were paying attention to what seems to be a growing epidemic of teacher burnout and were urgently looking for solutions. Because if they don't, I mean, there's going to be hemorrhaging really good teachers for the foreseeable future. Consider this. The pandemic may not have created the problem of teacher burnout, but it made a bad situation worse. A growing number of teachers are deciding not to return to the classroom, leaving some schools scrambling and often unable to fill vacancies. As a new academic year begins, how will schools hold on to teachers? We've gradually seen a need to be more creative in finding and retaining staff. That's coming up.

From NPR, I'm Don Gagne. It's Saturday, August 27th. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Any teacher in America will tell you how from 2020 we went from hero to zero. Like a lot of other teachers across America this year, Ryan Hosinski won't be returning to his high school teaching job in September. You know, just the stress of all that, I think, was a big part of it, and at the end of the day, you know, as much as I hate to say it, it was a financial choice, and I had to walk away from a job and a career that I love deeply.

Megan McKenna used to be a high school teacher in Park City, Utah, and B.R. spoke to her earlier this month, two weeks after she quit her job. This last year was the hardest yet of my career. And after finishing the year just completely drained and demoralized, I felt like there had to be something else out there. I couldn't do another year like that. Coming up, how one school made big changes in order to hold on to existing teachers and attract new talent. Since the COVID pandemic, we've seen more openings and fewer applicants.

And so it's gotten to a point where we're having to think outside the box. John Kuhn is superintendent of the Mineral Wells Independent School District in the small city of Mineral Wells, Texas, about 60 miles west of the Dallas-Fort Worth region. The district serves about 3,300 students from pre-K through 12th grade, and like a lot of other schools around the country, he was having a hard time filling teacher vacancies. So this year, Mineral Wells schools went to a four-day week. I spoke with him about how they arrived at the decision and whether it was making a difference. Well, we certainly weren't the first ones to do it. We had seen other school districts do it in recent years, but just kind of a smattering.

And what got me to pay attention, because I really was not for this idea initially, but when the third school district around us adopted, when their board voted to go to the four-day school week, within a week or two, we lost one of our veteran teachers to that school district. And that made me raise an eyebrow. But then almost immediately, we lost three or four more teachers to that same school district and then one teacher to one of the other two school districts on a four-day week. So at that point, I just asked my school board the question, is this something we should start looking at, talking about? Are we at a competitive disadvantage for employees if we're surrounded by schools that are offering a four-day school week? And at that point, I was still relatively opposed to the idea,

but a local online news organization did a poll when the third of those school districts went to the four-day week. They did a, it was a Facebook poll. It wasn't scientific, but they asked the question, would you be in favor of Mineral Wells ISD also going to a four-day school week? And so what I expected the outcome of that poll to be, I expected it to be extremely divisive. I thought it would be about a 50-50 split, but the actual result was 70% of the people were in favor of it and 20-something percent were against. That's the point where I started to really take it seriously and we started to do our research. It is complicated though, isn't it? You can see the appeal for teachers looking to go to a four-day week, but for parents, it raises all sorts of issues. Daycare, just for starters.

Well, that's the obvious first obstacle that comes up, and that's the reason I was opposed to it initially. But when we started doing our research, we started talking to other schools that had gone to the four-day week. We found out that the daycare issue was really not a big issue. What they found was that school districts that are on the regular five-day week, they have lots of weeks throughout the school year where there's a student holiday or there's a day for professional development, and parents on those weeks have to find something for their children to do, daycare, stay with grandma, or what have you. So in reality, when you actually dig into this issue and start looking at creating a four-day calendar, many of your

Fridays off or Mondays off, if you do it that way, they're days you were already out of school for several of the weeks during the school year because you may have a day off on a Wednesday for professional development. So that ended up, well, as an example, we offered optional Friday remediation for grades four and below. And so any parent in the district that wanted to sign up and have their children come to school on those Fridays that we're no longer in school, we're paying some teachers to work those days. We're paying a principal to open up one of the campuses. And so we opened that up to all of those parents, grades four and below, and we had 53 sign up. Now, our total enrollment is over 3,300 students. So it turned out that that wasn't

as big of an obstacle as you would kind of initially think that it would be. And in fact, when we did a poll of our parents, we sent it out through our email system to parents of students who are enrolled, we found 69% were in favor and only 25% were opposed. And so that definitely got our attention. Can you just briefly describe for our listeners how the new schedule works? Yeah. So those Fridays that we're not in school, many of them are just a student and staff holiday. Four of them are what we call accelerated instruction days. And those are days that are designed to provide remediation for students who have shown difficulties in the classroom, difficulties on standardized testing. And then seven of those days throughout the year are designated for professional development, where

teachers will come in and either, you know, work on new technologies, learn new techniques in the classroom. So that Friday is not always a day off for teachers, but it is always a day off for students, with the exception of those optional Friday remediation students who have chosen to come. Are the remaining four days longer days? Yes. Yes, sir. It's a little different for the different levels. Our elementaries and our junior high and our high school, they weren't all extended by the exact same amount, but on average, we've extended the school day by about 30 minutes, and we added six additional school days at the beginning of the summer. So the summer was shrunk down a little bit, but we had those Fridays off to kind of offset

that. And what about the actual amount of time spent in school for students? About the same? Well, that's actually interesting. The state of Texas requires schools to have students in instruction for 75,600 minutes. So we have a lot of flexibility there. We are still over that minimum. But one of the things we realized early on is as far as the actual time a student is in a classroom with their designated teacher, with their classroom teacher, we think it's going to be a wash and they might actually have more time with their teacher because optional student absences like a dentist appointment or orthodontist appointment, our parents are now going to have the ability to schedule those on Fridays when we don't have class. And teacher pay unchanged?

Teacher pay is unchanged and that means it's a net raise for our teachers, and that's a great ability to have to give a raise without having to raise taxes or anything to find money. If we can step back just a little bit, what has it been like to hire and try to keep teachers over the past few years in your district? In my district and every district around me, it has been a constant struggle to figure out what can we do to make our job as appealing as possible for teachers. It is extremely hard to be a teacher in the current political climate. It's extremely difficult to be a teacher when you're facing issues like the pandemic that we just went through. And take away all the political pressures. Take away the pandemic. It was a hard job to begin with.

There's tons of pressure to get results. And so it's a job for passionate people who really care. And that makes it really, really hard sometimes, especially as the percentage of students that we teach come from more and more trying circumstances, whether it's socioeconomics or whether it's child abuse and neglect, whether it's drug abuse in the home, whether it's homelessness, whether it's chronic illness or hunger. There are just so many harms that befall our students that make educating kids harder than it's probably been for a long,

long time, right? And so you put all that together and then you look at the pay that teachers earn compared to what they could make in the private sector with the same qualifications, and it's really, really hard to find and keep teachers right now. And just to get a now versus then comparison, how does this year compare to vacancies over, say, the past few years? Well, it's about the same in that we filled all our vacancies, and we always do. The difference is the size of the hole that we had to fill this summer was a whole lot bigger than the size of the hole we typically have to fill. The number of applicants for positions, you know, was less. But in terms of the four-day weeks effect, I know at least one anecdotal story we had when the board was getting ready to vote on this decision. We had an applicant we had offered a job to, and when we called and said, you know, are you going to accept the job?

She said, I'm waiting to see what your board vote is because I have another offer from another neighboring school district. The board approved the four-day week and she decided to come work for us. So at least in one case, we had a teacher choose to come work for us because of the four-day week or at least that's what she said. What are you doing to measure whether this really truly works? It's not just that parents like it and that teachers like it. Well, we have ongoing internal assessments that are both formative and summative, and so we're going to continue to use the same assessments we've been using for several years, and we'll monitor the results of those assessments.

The big test will come at the end of the school year with Texas' STAR test, which is the standardized test that the state gives. And we'll be looking at those results very closely to see what happened this year. We have a lot of confidence that you can move to a four-day week and your students can increase their performance. And so we're really not looking at the number of days a student sits in class as the thing that makes the biggest difference. What we think makes the biggest difference is the quality of the instruction that's going on in that classroom. That was John Kuhn, superintendent of the Mineral Wells Independent School District in Mineral Wells, Texas. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Don Gongy.