Community Collaborative Day 3

All about staff at Conroe ISD: professional development, recruitment & retention, and much more!

Catch-up on Day 1 & Day 2!

On the third meeting of the Conroe ISD Community Collaborative group, we learned a great deal about how school staff are developed from within, giving teachers the resources they need to continue expanding their skillsets and building their careers. We also learned from the Director of HR on how employees are recruited, hired, and which programs are in place to incentivize them to stay within the district.

It was another day watching passionate, experienced professionals show how they keep such a large school district moving forward.

I noted that most of the collaboration group was present, but only two of the five people running for CISD Board (so far) were there. This was disappointing, as it was probably the most important meeting of the group, focusing on a critical piece of public education: Teachers.

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This collab meeting was at Knox Junior High during a staff development day, where we were able to watch professional development in action. It was certainly an eye-opening experience, and it gave me insight into what Denise was doing during those days!

My first takeaway from seeing staff development is that it looked like a great time, keeping in mind that there were no students there for the day. The school felt relaxed, teachers were learning and discussing topics that interested them, and you could see experienced teachers sharing their strategies with newer staff. There were instructional coaches for each group, providing teachers a folder of materials and going through workshops as a team. You could hear them collaborate, ask questions, and share which strategies worked for them.

While walking between workshops, we saw the largest group of teachers in the cafeteria where the principal from Wilkerson Intermediate, Josh Hughes, was going through what appeared to be a really fun team-building exercise. He will be moving as principal from Wilkerson to McCullough next school year.

Professional Learning Development

Dr. Hedith Sauceda-Upshaw, Assistant Superintendent for Teaching & Learning, and Dayren Carlisle, Director for Curriculum, Instruction, and Professional Learning (that’s a mouthful), both gave presentations on how Conroe ISD trains its teachers and develops its leaders.

It is extensive.

One of the big selling points to working in CISD is that it doesn’t simply hire teachers to teach. The district helps build their skillsets from day one, providing a well-developed instructional model with a lengthy list of resources. The district then continues to develop them as time goes on, giving them professional development and continuing education, as required for them to maintain their teaching certification.

Basically, teachers in CISD are not left to fend for themselves when it comes to being a teacher. They are given resources, training (e.g. building curriculum), and direction. Teachers being given these resources is only one aspect of where the district excels, as we have highlighted in these collaboration meetings.

There is also a well-developed Professional Learning Framework available online to align with the Instructional Model.

There were several other highlights made by Dr. Upshaw on their efforts. Check out the slide deck here.

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Let’s think about the other side of this for a moment.

There is a balance when it comes to district driven development versus individual school or teacher autonomy. There are groups that focus on teacher autonomy, and recent successes are reported in school districts where staff have more autonomy to make decisions around things like professional development or curriculum.

Do a search for “teacher autonomy” and you will find a plethora of material:

Link

“Although I was a licensed teacher, I had three years to prove I could teach. According to a state-mandated evaluation via a portfolio, I had to provide evidence of 42 criteria based on eight standards. I was assigned a mentor whom I had to meet with once a week, as well as attend district meetings several times a quarter. I realize these were part of both state and federal mandates, but, as a professional, I found the constant supervision from mentors and administrators to be offensive. After my portfolio was approved, I thought the oversight would subside, but the supervision only increased until I chose to resign years later. Teaching isn’t a career that believes you’re a professional until you prove you aren’t; you’re constantly having to prove you’re a professional.

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Like all teachers, we were expected to attend “all the other” meetings: staff meetings, professional developments, professional learning communities, curriculum meetings, team meetings, and many more. And again, over the span of 20 years, the numbers of meetings only increased while the autonomy of the classroom was becoming less and less.”

There appears to be a difficult balance conundrum related to district oversight versus professional autonomy.

On one hand, you have thousands of experienced teachers who may lament constant oversight. On the other, you have the need to keep methods and curriculum fresh in mind, making sure staff have all the resources they need to be their best.

There is also a desire by CISD to make sure that no matter where your child is attending school that they have a quality education. District models, frameworks, and whatever else, is needed to keep our schools aligned on best practices. Dr. Upshaw commented that it shouldn’t matter if your child goes to one school versus another, or they have one teacher versus another. She wants that child’s education to have a similar impact and results regardless of where they are.

Lastly, new teachers need direction. This is especially so considering we have more veteran teachers leaving the profession in record numbers, and thus more school districts are having to hire students right off the graduation stage, as well as alternative-certified teachers who do not have formal education training.

These newer teachers need these models and frameworks. Yet, I question the impact this has on experienced, professional educators who spend 4-6 years towards education degrees.

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The second part of the Professional Learning presentation focused on leadership development and how we pipeline staff into leadership positions such as Assistant Principals and beyond.

There was a great discussion around this, but I need to explore this separately as there are many opinions on how CISD moves staff into leadership and what challenges are seen.

CISD Leadership Definition

Recruiting & Retaining Teachers

Paula Green, Executive Director of Human Resources, gave a detailed presentation on how the district recruits and retains teachers. Paula definitely gives off HR vibes, and I mean that as a compliment. She has that stern look that might make you confess what you did wrong without asking, but when she opens up the smile you get the feeling of being welcome. She’s also extremely knowledgeable.

These were the highlights for CISD’s recruiting and retention efforts:

• Teacher Incentive Allotment - Where teachers can get extra pay based on student scores, receiving possibly tens of thousands of dollars extra per year. This allotment is very complex and will need its own write-up.

• National Board Certification Program - The district will pay for the fees associated with a teacher earning National Board Certification, which comes with a variety of benefits. It requires the teacher commit to the district for three years after receiving certification

• Grow Our Own Events - Open nights where people interested in teaching can learn about being alternatively certified. This topic could also use a lengthy write-up.

• Scholarships - Available to teachers depending on programs they wish to take part in.

• TEA Certification Pathways - Various methods to both keep existing teachers certified and helping new teachers obtain their certification. This includes:

  • Students in college working to become a teacher. They can work as interns, then move from probationary certification and finally to standard certification.

  • District of Innovation (DOI), a much-debated topic for CISD, allows the district to bring in alt-certified teachers at a higher rate based on the need.

• Partnerships with Universities and Educator Prep Programs - Sam Houston State University is CISD’s primary university partner to train and recruit new teachers.

• Yearlong Teacher Residents / Student Teachers - This is fairly new but compared to previous programs where student teachers would only have one semester of student teaching at a school, they can now have 1-2 years of residency at school while working towards their degree. The big difference is they have semester(s) shadowing a mentor teacher 3-5 days a week, and then 1-2 semesters leading a classroom for five days a week. Once they graduate and hire on at CISD, they hit the ground running ready to go.

  • Student teachers can be both unpaid interns and have paid options around $20,000/year. This was where you may have heard about grant money being used previously (part of ESSR funds) to incentivize more teachers to work at CISD as early as possible. Now that these funds are no longer available, these are now paid out of the district’s General Fund.

  • CISD keeps roughly 70% of the yearlong residents that go through its program.

• Job Fairs & On-Site Interviews - Multiple times a year, the district holds professional job fairs and “mini” job fairs where they can commit to teachers right then and there. If everything checks out with their qualifications, they get hired.

  • At the most recent job fair in March, out of 814 applicants that attended, 85 were hired and 72 were invited to onboarding.

• Social Media Campaigns - Self-explanatory

Staffing Allocations

Schools are staffed based on needs of students. This includes everything from campus professional staff to special programs, paraprofessionals, administrators, and auxiliary staffing. All of this is heavily dependent on available budget.

This means that teachers could be moved from school to school based on where they are needed, often without much consultation from the teachers themselves. For new teachers especially, there’s the policy of “first in, first out”, as in the newest teachers are the first to be moved if needed. This is not ideal for retention in my opinion, but I do not see a good solution around this.

Here’s the general workflow for when staff are moved:

Here is the full slide deck for Paula’s presentation: Link

Personal Thoughts on Retention

Everything we learned in this community collab meeting sounded great in presentation and on paper. The district is doing many things to enable teachers to be successful and keep them happy.

Yet, the district can only remedy issues within its control. We are still experiencing a major teacher shortage, and there are many reasons why:

State Support

Anyone who pays attention to local politics knows what the Texas Governor has been attempting to accomplish in the last few years, holding up teacher raises as a continued bargaining chip in the process. If we put that aside, there are still numerous areas where the state is simply not supporting teachers. These are the big ones:

1. Resources - As we learned in the first collab meeting, Texas finance for public schools is a nightmare to manage. This process includes how allotments are funded that directly impact resources for teachers. An overhaul in how schools are financed is a desperate need. This includes access adding more paraprofessionals, more special education resources, more funding for things like technology, and on and on.

2. Compensation - Most teachers will tell you they’re not in it for the money, but they still have to eat. Texas teacher salaries are below the national average and there is a lack of proper funding for retirement. Even the healthcare benefits, which used to be the best perk of working for the state, has become worthless due to the high costs of both healthcare and the insurance plans used to cover state workers.

Parent Support

While there are many, many parents who donate their time and money to support their kid’s teachers, there are a substantial (and growing) number of parents making life completely miserable for almost every teacher. This can manifest in lack of parenting, forcing the schools to discipline their children (where options are very limited), to placing teachers on constant blast with their principal or local social media groups about everything from “not liking my kid” to culture war nonsense (e.g., “teachers grooming kids to become trans”, “radical liberal ideologies”, etc.).

Join any Conroe ISD Facebook group and you will find parents complaining about the smallest of issues, almost all of which can be solved with a simple parent-teacher conversation or a better understanding of how things work.

Like any profession, you will find both great teachers and some not-so-great teachers. We must be patient and give teachers the benefit of the doubt that they are doing the best they can with what they have, and that includes not jumping to the worst conclusions possible from the beginning.

For those who wish to support CISD teachers further, be sure to send out a Teacher Achieving Excellence (TAE) whenever you can. You can do that via Parent Access here: https://pac.conroeisd.net/

Login to Parent Access > Communication > Teacher/Staff Excellence

Community Support

Outside of parents with children in public schools, the community at large impacts funding teachers with their votes, including which politicians they vote for and their support for bonds.

In Montgomery County, a very conservative area in Greater Houston, it has become a continued struggle to impress upon the entire community that we need to pass fully funded bonds, and vote people into office that support public education.

We need more voices to speak up for teachers and drive initiatives that support public schools.

Leadership Support

From the CISD local admin levels to our school board, teachers are not being consistently supported as they should. This can be support for more autonomy, access to resources, funding for basic supplies, or even shielding parents from angry parents. There are plenty of stories where a teacher is doing the best they can, and they’ll get thrown under the bus by their principal because a parent is upset.

It varies from school to school, but many times teachers are driven out of the profession because of local leadership due to principals or assistant principals. Similarly, parents can also find lack of support from campus local leadership, which has led to some well-known lawsuits.

Of course, even with the school district bending over backwards to support student needs, it does not prevent someone from suing.

Student Discipline

Discipline is a difficult topic to cover as it varies from district to district, and there are both state and federal laws that schools must manage when considering what to do with a child that has disruptive behavior.

The hard truth is that teachers are often left to deal with disruptive students without much support from local administrators, being asked to teach a large class while simultaneously managing a child melting down, or there is simply no path for disruptive kids to be placed out of the classroom that works, due to lack of space at ‘Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs (DAEP).

In my opinion, the School Board needs to support policy that removes disruptive students from classrooms and puts the responsibility back onto parents. Send those kids home.

Class Sizes

Over the last decade Conroe ISD has seen an explosion of growth in single-family homes and multi-tenant apartments, which we discussed in the last post. With limited community support to fully fund bonds and build new schools, class sizes continue to increase. As far back as 2016 we saw classroom sizes in the 30s, as in 30+ students to one teacher. This is absurd and puts too much pressure on teachers.

Unfortunately, class size is not something the school district can address until every other item above this one is dealt with.

Closing & Next Meetings

That wraps up the third meeting of the Conroe ISD Community Collaboration, with only two more to go. Our next meeting will be at a high school where we will be discussing special programs (CTE, fine arts, gifted programs, athletics, bilingual programs, special education), as well as catch-up from a last meeting regarding how zoning works.

Thanks for reading!

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Collab Meeting Summaries:

Meeting 1: Intro to Conroe ISD, Finance, Procurement
Meeting 2: Growth & Transportation
Meeting 3: Staff Development, Recruitment, Retention
Meeting 4: CTE, SPED, Extracurriculars, Zoning
Meeting 5: Planning & Construction, School Safety, Summer School