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Our Budget Crisis is Striking at the Very Heart of One
of California's Most Precious Resources: Our Teachers
On May 15, more than 14,000 teachers who previously received pink slip notices will learn their fate, as districts send out their final layoff notices. The nationwide economic slump and housing crisis have placed many people in a bind, but now thousands of our teachers face the prospect of losing their jobs, as well.
Thanks to this perfect storm of events, school districts from Texas, Nevada, Virginia, Kansas, and Hawaii are now actively recruiting our educators by offering them signing bonuses to fill their own teacher shortages.
We have seen ads placed by these out-of-state districts on freeway billboards, in newspapers, and on the radio. Some are also sending delegations to California and contacting teachers unions directly to lure our educators away.
- The Hawaii Department of Education is in the process of planning a third recruiting trip to the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas and is offering additional bonuses to Special Education teachers.
- Recruiters from Kansas have contacted the California Federation of Teachers directly for advice on how to advertise to talented teachers facing layoffs.
- The Clark County School District in Henderson, Nevada has been running print advertisements in all of California's major markets and advertising at California State Universities in San Francisco, Long Beach, and Dominguez Hills. They also began recruiting in California in April and have two more trips planned in May and June.
- The Houston Independent School District plans on running advertisements in newspapers across the state and sending recruiters to help fill the 1,200 vacant positions in its schools. The Aldine Independent School District has already begun advertising in the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle in hopes of attracting teachers to Texas.
- The Fort Worth Independent School District has caught the attention of many pink-slipped teachers with billboards in San Diego and San Francisco reading: "Your Future is in Our Classroom." They have already received about 40 applications online and a number of educators have flown to Texas for interviews. Recruiters from Fort Worth ISD will be in San Diego next week.
The loss of quality educators will be detrimental to the quality of education in California. Passionate and talented teachers will be pulled away to other states in search of job opportunities and economic stability. We need to retain these exceptional teachers in order to continue working toward closing California's achievement gap and providing the highest-quality education to all of our students.
For more information on California's budget crisis, please visit: Budget Crisis Report Card.
For a still picture of O'Connell at an Education Coalition news conference on May 9, 2008 about the recruitment of teachers from out of state, please visit Year 2008 - Multimedia.
