While 32 percent of students in the Everett School District are minorities, only 7 percent of the people who teach them, including librarians and other certificated staff, are minorities.
As the district faces a wave of possible retirements in the next few years, officials are stepping up their efforts to look for teachers.
To fill the gap, they’re also trying to bring more minorities on board to reflect the student population.
“We have a big interest and desire to recruit diverse teaching positions so they have the skills and abilities to work with our students’ different backgrounds and different ethnicities,” said Molly Ringo, executive director of human resources.
The district isn’t alone in its lack of minority teachers. The national average of minority teachers is expected to decrease from 9 percent in 1990 to 5 percent in 2010.
The south end of the Everett School District is thought of as less diverse than the north end, though numbers vary from school to school.
At Emerson Elementary School in the north end, only about 56 percent of students are white. Almost one-fifth of the school’s population is Hispanic. Almost 12 percent are Asian and about 4 percent are black.
At Woodside Elementary, one of the south end’s more diverse schools, about 61 percent of students are white. More than 16 percent of students are Hispanic, 8 percent are Asian, 6 percent are black and 2 percent are American Indian or Alaskan Native.
Kiesha Hall, who’s half African-American, has taught at Woodside and at Cedar Wood Elementary, and now teaches first grade at Forest View Elementary, a school that opened this year.
It’s important to recruit quality teachers in general, she said. It’s also important to recruit more minority teachers, she said.
“Kids deserve to see people that reflect the world we are sending them out to,” Hall said.
At Jackson High School, just over 70 percent of students are white. About 18 percent of students are Asian, about 5 percent are Hispanic, almost 3 percent are black and about 1 percent are American Indian or Alaskan Native.
George Ortiz, who teaches science at Jackson High School, said that a school’s teaching population should reflect its student population. But even when there are fewer minorities, it’s no less important to connect with them, he said.
“I do have African-American and Hispanic students, and I should be able as a teacher to connect with them as well,” he said.
Ortiz recently finished taking a course on multicultural education issues from the University of Washington at Bothell. He doesn’t think that hiring teachers of color is the only way to reach minority students.
“What it boils down to is being able to see the perspectives of your students and it helps being of that culture, but I think there are other ways you can educate your teachers, too,” he said.
Trying to hire minority teachers has its challenges, partly because other districts with a skewed teacher/student ethnicity profile want to hire them as well.
“Other districts have the same interest, so there is a lot of competition for talented individuals,” said Ringo.
Another problem: there are less minority applicants.
“(There are) not as many as we would like,” Ringo said.
In the next few years, the district has a growing number of teaching and other certificated positions to fill.
In June 2008, between 70 and 105 certificated staff will be eligible to retire, according to district records.
By June 2010, an additional 120 certificated staff will be eligible to retire.
In general, due of retirements, resignations and leaves, the district hires about 100 new teachers a year. There are about 1,100 certificated staff in the district right now.
“We don’t know how many retirements we will have for next year at this point,” Ringo said. “We need to be prepared to fill those positions when the vacancies occur.”
Officials have been researching the number of certificated staff eligible to retire in the next one to five years and reviewing hiring statistics, including minority staff statistics.
They’ve been visiting career fairs and plan to go to symposiums for student teachers, screen candidates at college campuses, set up student teacher internships and look into partnerships with universities, among other outreach activities.
In an effort to recruit diverse employees, they’ve also added a welcome page and application information in Arabic, Korean, Spanish, Russian and Vietnamese on the district’s Web site.
The application must be filled out in English, Ringo said.
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