Recruiting Teachers to an Island

The school year begins in one month. At the risk of jinxing it, we are fully staffed as of today.  When your school is on an island 30 miles out to sea, this is no small accomplishment.  Teacher recruitment can be challenging in many districts.  Here on the island, I believe we face added challenges with teacher recruitment that other districts on the mainland may not experience.  Unlike other cities and towns, you cannot commute to the island.  You must live here in order to teach here.  While you theoretically could commute and take a flight or ferry back and forth every day, you would be challenged to get here on time and it would cost a fortune. Additionally, if the boats and planes are not running due to weather, you would be unable to make it to school at all. So, commuting is not a viable option. The biggest challenge to relocating here in order to teach is the shortage of affordable housing on the island.  Not only are housing costs unbelievably expensive, rentals are in high demand and short supply.  There is just not a lot of inventory for available year-round rentals.  Many of our teachers end up in a school-year rental and then do the "shuffle" to another apartment/cottage for the summer or move off-island for the summer. For some perspective, a rental that is around $1500/month during the school year, may go for as much as $3000/week in the summer or more! Simply unaffordable for most.

So, what does this mean for teacher recruitment.  Unfortunately, it makes it all that much harder to attract the best of the best.  Teaching simply does not have the compensation that will attract students who finish in the top of their college class. This is true everywhere. While our salary and benefit package is better than most to offset some of the cost of living impacts of living on an island, it is still difficult to relocate here unless you have some connection to housing.

We probably need to start thinking out of the box for how we find the best of the best teachers.  Here are some creative ways we could do this. Some of these are applicable to all school districts and some are island specific.

1) Offer a signing bonus that must be used for housing/moving expenses in the first year.
2) Purchase and/or build staff housing.
3) Become the school version of a teaching hospital. Offer residencies for teachers to learn from experienced teachers to later fill open positions.
4) Establish partnerships with colleges and universities that could help offset some of the cost for this residency model.
5) Instead of going to job fairs where we struggle to compete with districts on the mainland, set up our own job fair and/or college visits to specifically meet with and recruit teachers.

While all of the above may not be possible in the short term, we will continue to think about creative ways that we can not only attract, but retain the best educators.

Another blog for another time - teacher preparation... Why teacher prep schools should be more like medical schools and why compensation for teachers should be more in line with the medical profession.