Secretary's Column
By Dr. Rick Melmer
Department of Education

Filling the pipeline

Education is full of challenges, and it’s easy to get caught up with the obstacles rather than the opportunities. One of our greatest challenges in education is to find the best quality people to fill our positions each year. There is always an emphasis on teaching shortages, but we have similar concerns about administrative openings in districts all across the state.

Much is said about money and the need to pay people more to do the work that needs to be done. Even though money will always be a concern in all employment areas, it is also true that money is often times not the most important factor when it comes to attracting and retaining people in employment areas. Other factors are also important, and I’d like to address some of those key areas as we discuss recruiting and keeping our staff members.

These are some key indicators to consider as we explore the need for quality educators in our state.

1. Promote our profession – As educators, we should talk about the positive aspects of our employment field. Too often, we don’t encourage others to follow in our footsteps. Why? I think we as educators should be the lead recruiters in the encouragement of others to enter the field of education. Too often we encourage others towards jobs that provide more financial rewards rather than focusing on the benefits of education.

2. Identify talent – There are young people that would be excellent teachers. We should be planting that seed with them now in the hopes that they will pursue education in the future. Also, there are teachers that have the skills to be excellent administrators. We need strong leadership in the future and should begin talking with these teachers about a future in administration.

3. Target resources – I mentioned earlier that we tend to focus on salaries as our guide for recruitment efforts. What about other ways to reward educators? With the TCAP program, we can now target resources to reward teachers for extra effort. We can focus our resources on benefit programs like insurance or enhanced leave programs that could benefit all educators in your system and improve retention and recruitment.

I remain optimistic that we can find high quality individuals to work in our school districts. We will need to make it a priority and begin to explore new and different approaches to improve our recruiting efforts.