ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
Recruitment and retention for the USD 480 schools has long been a topic and Monday evening, Director of Recruitment and Education Ashley Kappelmann talked to the USD 480 school board about ways to help with just that.
“To give the board an idea of the current reality, right now, there are 209 licensed teachers in classrooms – and I went through and just looked at positions in the classroom – and there are 98 unlicensed staff in classrooms right now as classroom teachers,” Kappelmann said. “Out of those 98, four of them are currently student teaching, 55 of them are currently on a plan to get certified, 26 are not currently on a plan but working toward implementing a plan, and a lot of that is because we’ve been working to find colleges and universities that would work with us for our specific situations. Right now, there are 11 in the classroom not currently on a plan – when we started this, that number was 16, so that means there are five who decided to get on a plan for licensure. There is some projected growth, we’ll have more staff currently student teaching who should be certified by this coming spring. And if everyone stays on track for their anticipated completion date, we should have 23 staff members on track to be certified by the start of the 2026-27 school year, which is great. It’s great seeing the fruits of that labor that’s been going on for quite some time by this point. We estimate that number to be around 49 by 2030 in terms of having all their licensure obtained. It’s really exciting what we found when we started putting all of this information together, and we’re on a good track compared to before.”
Kappelmann then went into more detail about the work being done by her and her team.
“We have a framework we’re working from called Grow Here, Teach Here, Lead Here, and we want to make sure our work not only encompasses addressing pre-licensed staff but also our current staff and enhancing their education and developing leaders,” Kappelmann said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean just principals or district positions, but staff members who want to be leaders in their own right based on their various experience and other opportunities.”
Kappelmann added a lot of work has been going into putting together a consistent message for potential recruits.
“We’ve been working a lot with pre-licensed staff to become licensed teachers, and what we’ve started with, since we have a lot of information out there, is working to make it a consistent message,” Kappelmann said. “Something that’s important in that regard is having a consistent terminology. We’re in a pilot program for the Registered Licensed Apprenticeship Program through the Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE), and those individuals are our teacher apprentices, who fill roles of paraprofessionals, interim teachers, interventionists, etc., but they do have that apprentice title since they’re in the program working toward getting that licensure. We’d also like to add on a Youth Apprenticeship since we have students in the education pathway. That plan of study, if they’re able to follow it, will help them get their associate’s degree upon completion of high school. There is also some new personnel terminology. We wanted to separate our interim staff and have a better count on how things were going, so we have two terms for interim teachers now – At-Will and Resident. At-Will interims are those who do not have an interest in being on a plan. They’re currently here to serve a need and fill in, which we truly appreciate, and we will work every semester to advise them as best we can and make sure that’s where they want to remain. Those positions are at will, meaning they’re open at any given time and will be filled by a certified staff member if one is found. The Resident interims are the ones we’re investing in each other – they’ve signed on to do a plan and we will holding a spot for them once they have their licensure to three years. Many of them take the tuition reimbursement, but they don’t HAVE to in order to be a resident interim.”
Kappelmann praised the work going on.
“The district coordinators for elementary and secondary interims are the ones helping those pre-licensed staff members, and they’re in more of an advising role so we can make sure everyone is meeting the necessary benchmarks and targets and everything else,” Kappelmann said. “That brings us to the professional plan of study – starting next year, after we get everything approved, we want to bring before the board that professional plan of study along with the tuition reimbursement request. Because if you’re going to take that, we want to have something that basically says they’re not just taking the money and running, they intend to meet the necessary criteria. That will also help a lot with funding planning because then we’ll know how much we need to prepare for in terms of tuition reimbursement.”
There are multiple goals Kappelmann said she and staff would like to accomplish by the end of the year.
“For this year, we want to bring to the board one pre-licensed staff pay scale – right now, there’s a pay scale for interims, a pay scale for apprentices, a pay scale for student teachers, etc., so what we’re working on is one scale for everyone who’s pre-licensed and on a pathway,” Kappelmann said. “In terms of manuals and overall processes, we’ve discovered these are so important in terms of ensuring consistency of access to one message so everyone’s getting the correct, accurate information. It also helps in terms of recruitment because we can have an answer right there instead of telling them ‘I don’t know, I’ll check and get back to you later.’ We also want to identify pathway gaps and barriers, we’ve started reaching out to colleges and universities to schedule meetings to discuss what gaps there are and what programs would be helpful to fill those in. There’s also been a ton of work that’s gone into figuring out what programs and partnerships we’re already part of and what ones we could become part of as time goes on. We do have a marketing and promotions intern who, during his first day on the job, looked at other schools’ job sites and Web sites and social media and compared them to ours so we could make ours better, and it was really in-depth. He’s going to he a huge help as time goes on.”
Kappelmann continued discussing other upcoming work and concluded by saying there will be plenty of work coming up in the future.
For the meeting’s only item of new business, the board unanimously approved the Classified Staff and Administration raises. The Classified Staff raise will be 4 percent effective Sept. 16, and the Administration raise will be 3.7 percent.
