The Texas Education Agency recently announced the creation of a new statewide, Web-based, school district job search tool 
.The job search tool allows job seekers to search for openings in the state’s 1,200 school districts and charter schools. Searchers can input their address, ZIP code, or city to find a list of openings and links to Web sites that include job listings.
The tool will be helpful to prospective teachers moving to Texas or teachers moving to a different area of the state. The link is called “School District Jobs” and it is located in the list on the left side of the “Teacher” and “Administrator” Web portals.
TEA’s Division of Educator and Student Policy Initiatives is working with the Texas Workforce Commission on a comprehensive, user-friendly Web site that will include education jobs in the state, pathways to certification, statewide and district-specific incentives and benefits for educators, and HR information for potential applicants. The idea is to attract more qualified teaching candidates to Texas school districts.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) sent a letter to administrators in August noting that the state has yet to meet the highly qualified teacher requirements of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. The state should have been in compliance by the end of the 2006–07 school year. NCLB requires that all teachers of core subjects be highly qualified. A list of due dates to submit NCLB compliance reports for the 2010–11 school year was also included.
In late August, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) sent a letter to school administrators on the status of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) paraprofessional requirements. District administrators may not have noticed an important new requirement that got a brief mention on the second page of the letter but could affect district staffing. Specifically, districts that have paraprofessionals that don’t meet NCLB’s highly qualified (HQ) requirements and work in Title I schools will be required to remove or reassign them to non-Title I schools immediately. The new requirement is in effect for this school year and beyond.
Districts are required to report their compliance with the highly qualified rules for paraprofessionals as of Sept. 15, 2010, amend the report if there are changes, and complete an end-of-the-year update by June 15, 2011. TEA’s NCLB Program Coordination staff will follow up with districts that report paraprofessionals that don’t meet HQ requirements at Title I schools to discuss their removal or reassignment and the documentation that must be provided by the district.
In prior years, districts could employ paraprofessionals that didn’t meet HQ requirements on Title I campuses as long as they reported them accurately and did not pay their salaries out of Title I funds. School administrators with questions about NCLB’s paraprofessional requirements should contact TEA’s Division of NCLB Program Coordination at 512-463-9374.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security clarified and made minor modifications to the requirements for completing and storing Form I-9s in a final rule effective Aug. 23, 2010.
Employers must complete a Form I-9 within three business days of hiring an employee. Employers may use paper I-9s with original handwritten signatures, I-9s in electronic format with acceptable electronic signatures, or a combination of the two options. When an employer uses electronic signatures, it must provide a printed confirmation of the signature transaction only if the employee who signed the I-9 asks for one.
Should the district opt to photocopy or create electronic images of documents the employee presents as proof of employment eligibility, they should be filed either with the Form I-9 or with the employee’s records. Any electronic storage method used must include an indexing system that permits searches and must allow the identification and retrieval of documents for review with three business days.
The new rules clarify that an audit trail need not be kept each time the Form I-9 is viewed electronically. Audit trails are required only when I-9s are created, completed, updated, modified, altered, or corrected. For more information on completion and storage of Form I-9s and electronic signatures, visit the HR Library.
—Federal Register , Vol. 75, No. 140, Thursday, July 22, 2010.
Hundreds of Filipino guestworkers lured to teach in Louisiana schools were cheated out of tens of thousands of dollars and forced into exploitative contracts by an international trafficking ring run by labor contractors, according to a class action lawsuit filed by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the Southern Poverty Law Center , and Covington and Burling LLP.
The suit was filed on behalf of more than 350 Filipino teachers working in Louisiana under the federal H-1B guestworker program. It accuses officials of two labor contractors—Universal Placement International of Los Angeles and Manila-based PARS International Placement Agency—of human trafficking, racketeering, and fraud. The suit also names the East Baton Rouge Public School System, some school district officials, and a California lawyer for their part in the scheme.
Public schools in the U.S. increasingly turn to the H1-B guestworker program to fill teching positions. An AFT report indicates that the number of foreign teachers brought to the U.S. increased by 30 percent between 2002 and 2006. Texas is one of five states with the most foreign teachers.
The teachers began arriving in the U.S. in 2007 after having paid $16,000, several times the average household income in the Phillipines, to obtain jobs. Nearly all had to borrow money to pay the recruiting fees, and recruiters referred them to private lenders who charged exorbitant rates of interest. The teachers were also forced to sign away an additional 10 percent of the salaries they would earn during their second year of teaching. Teachers who refused sign the contracts were threatened with being sent home and losing the money they had already paid.
In a 2009 report, AFT called on federal, state, and local governments to more closely monitor the hiring of migrant teachers by U.S. schools districts and adopt and enforce ethical standards for international recruiting. “These teachers have been victimized in ways reminiscent of the worst abuses students learn about in history class: labor contracts signed under duress and arrangements that remind us of indentured servitude,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten. “The goal of this lawsuit is to put an end to this exploitation, which should have no place in 21st-century America.”
A University of Colorado report indicates that the performance pay program used by the Denver school system, ProComp, may have helped the district attract more effective teachers and boosted teacher retention in struggling schools.
University researchers did their analysis using eight school years of student and teacher data. Researchers compared each student’s results with those of other students with similar achievement histories and traced the data back to the students’ teachers. They also looked at the value-added data linked to specific teachers and reviewed data from surveys of teachers and principals in the district.
The findings show:
—“ProComp May Have Boosted Teacher Selection, Retention,” by Stephen Sawchuk, Education Week, June 22, 2010.
New research indicates that if employers want to retain and engage talented employees, they need to focus on base salary increases and providing training and career development. Forty-one percent of employers surveyed for Mercer’s Attraction and Retention Survey cited base-salary increases as the reward employees most value. Next in line were short- and long-term variable pay (cited by 36 percent) and training and career development (cited by 35 percent).
“Non-cash programs like career pathing, increased communication to employees and work-life initiatives are important in fostering employee retention and engagement regardless of the economic investment,” says Loree Griffith, a principal with Mercer’s rewards consulting business. “However, as recovery occurs, employers want to revisit pay as a means to staying competitive and retaining top-performing employees.”
More than one quarter (27 percent) of employers surveyed are expanding their overall workforce, while 3 percent have instituted broad-based workforce reductions. Almost half (45 percent) are hiring to replacement levels only, while another 25 percent are hiring just for critical areas.
Mercer is a global provider of consulting, outsourcing, and investment services.
—“Salaries, career development top ways to retain employees,” by Andrea Davis, Employee Benefit News online, June 30, 2010.
