EBR schools filling vacancies

• By CHARLES LUSSIER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 18, 2008 - Page: 5B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

With three weeks to go before school starts, the East Baton Rouge Parish school system is reporting 108 vacancies — but still has 231 applicants for these jobs.

Elizabeth Duran Swinford, associate superintendent of human resources, said the school system last year had 64 more vacancies at the same point in the year.

“We have no need to declare a critical shortage in any area,” Swinford said.

The 108 figure also does not reflect teachers hired Thursday afternoon at a teacher fair, and Swinford said some of the vacancies are new positions added in the past month.

Swinford attributed the strong hiring to a few factors:

• A total of 157 returning teachers from four schools taken over by the state and handed to private management. Swinford said at last count those four schools retained only five teachers who were there before the takeover.
• More-aggressive recruiting of teachers from the Philippines. Swinford said close to 100 teachers in Baton Rouge this year are from that Asian country, more than double the number who worked here in May.
• More hiring from alternative-certification programs, including 33 hired from a program run by the Louisiana Resource Center for Educators and 36 from Teach Baton Rouge.

Still, the school system is far from having a stable teacher corps in the fall.

Every year, the school system has dozens of teachers who wait until the first days of school to resign. Swinford said many of these teachers think, in error, that if they announced their resignation before the start of the new school year they would be dropped early from the parish’s health insurance plan.

Such last-minute vacancies are hard to fill because most teachers seeking new employment have already been hired elsewhere. In past years, the school system had to use more substitutes, or, failing that, have other teachers cover those classrooms without a teacher.

In other hiring, the School Board appointed new principals at three schools, filling all the current vacant principal positions. Two are reassignments: Linda Lewis, moving to Istrouma High School from Capitol High Pre-College Academy for Girls, and Cleo Perry, to Crestworth Elementary from Northeast Elementary, where he was an assistant principal. One is a new hire, Roy Higgins, who is taking over as principal at Capitol Middle School and who comes from the school system in Charlotte, N.C., where he ran a district-run boot camp.

Last month, the School Board reassigned 20 principals and assistant principals to its lowest-performing schools. Capitol Middle’s principal post, however, remained vacant after faculty, parents and students at Park Forest Middle School helped stop an effort to reassign their principal, Adam Smith, to Capitol Middle.

In other action Thursday, the board:

• Approved an average 9 percent increase in employee medical insurance premiums that will take effect in January. The vote was 8-2 in favor, with board member Darryl Robertson not voting and board member Jay Augustine absent. The increase is the first in three years for the school system.

For an employee, the monthly premium increases from $45 to $48 for the basic Core medical plan and from $96 to $106 for the more generous Buy Up plan. For an employee with a family, the monthly premium increases from $323 to $345 for the Core plan and from $443 to $480 for the Buy Up plan.

• Commended its finance and business department for its 22nd consecutive annual certificate of excellence in financial reporting from Government Finance Officers Association and Association of School Business Officials.

“This is the highest form of recognition for government accounting and financial reporting,” said Superintendent Charlotte Placide, who ran this department for years before taking over as superintendent in 2004.