while there was a significant shortage of teachers during the pandemic years, Porter says the district is close to 100% staffed, today.“I give a lot of credit to our administrators for their recruiting efforts,” he notes.“80% of a school district’s budget is labor and we’ve hired a lot of new teachers and specialists over the years in areas that were gaps for us. We’ve put a lot of professionals in our special education programs: social workers, speech language clinicians, OTs (Occupational Therapists) and PTs (Physical Trainers), along with MTSS interventionists and staff coaching roles. And there are a lot of teachers that will recruit their colleagues from other districts. We try to keep our district as attractive to our applicants as we possibly can -- salary and benefits and working conditions. It’s always a balancing act, but at the end of the day, we try our best to do that. We have a supporting staff plan that focuses on how we support our staff and how we can get feedback on things that we’re doing or not doing. So, the human resources piece is something that I think about every day. I know that a good staff means we’re educating our kids and keeping them current.” A NEW DISTRICT PROJECT Every school superintendent will also tell you that the system’s physical assets need to be constantly maintained and upgraded. “Each summer, we do a lot of work on our facilities,” says Porter. “This past summer, we got some state and local funds to upgrade our buildings -- putting in windows and replacing floors. In June, voters approved a multiphased, capital project that we will be working on over the next three years: a new primary school. We’ll be shifting all our grade configurations after the school is built. We call it the One Campus Project. We’re in the design phase, right now, and 6 months from now we will have broken ground. The Project will relieve a lot of pressure on us. We have 29 modular classrooms right now in our district so we’ll be replacing all of those as part of that project. We’ll also have a new artificial turf field with athletics and play space. And we’re redesigning the entire campus – moving roads, parking, etc. to make it more user-friendly. We have an addition going on to what will become our intermediate school as part of this package and a lot of other smaller phases. It’s a well-rounded look at what the school district needs. It was in a five-year review and finally got passed, 260 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 05, ISSUE 12
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTI5MjAx