Many community members have been concerned about the effect this board and superintendent might have on the staff in the district…we all asked, how many would leave after this past school year? And would the district be able to replace them (as it turns out, it’s having a hard time of that part, with 16 teacher positions still unfilled at this moment). I wanted to get the facts out on this topic, but found it surprisingly difficult to get a concrete number. So let me explain the data I’m about to present.
At first, myself and others tracked resignations via word of mouth, but I quickly realized that was unreliable data. So, the data here depends almost exclusively on the meeting minutes from board meetings going back to December (those meeting minutes include staff resignations, retirements, and new hires). The only exception is some resignations announced since the last board meeting in June. Staff hired anytime in 2023 have not been included in these calculations.
The other side of it, and an unexpected complication, was determining exactly how many people actually work in the district. For that we scraped data from the district website at the end of February, and combined it with a more comprehensive data set that was obtained towards the end of the school year. That last data set quickly proved to be too broad, including some people no longer with the district, and some known substitute teachers.
Bottom line is, this data is 99% accurate but may have an error or two. If the district publishes their own data, I’ll readily post an update to these numbers. Also, there may yet be further resignations before the new school year starts, so final numbers will be posted in late August. Lastly, I thought it useful to show two bits of data…the percent of teachers leaving the school at the end of last year, as well as the overall percent of staff (including teachers) leaving.
That said, how have the board and superintendent’s actions impacted staffing levels in our district? I found it most useful to break this down on a school by school basis. As you can see, a Summit and Columbine have weathered this storm well. Gateway is absolutely devastated…the school that received the Governor’s Distinguished Improvement Award this past spring is effectively an all-new school this year. The middle school and high school also each lost a very large percentage.
Of course, the question on everyone’s mind is, is this normal?
Insiders tell me it’s far from normal, but I do like data, so I dove into the data the CDE makes readily available and came up with a chart. It shows turnover is typically around 15-19%, and there was a weird spike in the COVID years – I don’t know what to make of that, except that those years were full of abnormalities across this country in societal trends (and with remote learning that year, I suspect many of the district positions were cut? I’m not certain). With the COVID year uncertainty, I instead compare this past year with the years previous, which shows the fears of a teacher exodus were well founded (last year was showing a small uptick, but nothing compared to this year).
To interpret that data – when it says ’23-24 compared with ’22-23, what that means is how many teachers or staff in the ’22-23 school year did not return for the ’23-24 school year.
Once the school year starts, we’ll have a final tally and I’ll update this then.
To protect teacher privacy, I will not be releasing my spreadsheet summary of the data as it includes all staff names, but I will share it with any legitimate reporters who are interested. You can reach me using the contact form on this website.