District discusses recruitment, retention, increased licensing
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.”
