School district recruiters work hard to fill Texas classrooms with quality teachers but have to battle more than just recruiters from other districts in their efforts to fill open positions.
They have to deal with timelines that stymie their ability to hire the best teacher candidates who typically get snatched up in the spring. Because state law allows teacher to resign up to 45 days before the first day of instruction, districts often get a rash of resignations in June and July (or sometimes August, since districts have no meaningful way to enforce the July deadline).
By that time, a significant percentage of their teacher applicants, usually the most qualified, have withdrawn their applications to accept a position elsewhere. With the best candidates gone, recruiters have to settle for less qualified people as they fill open positions. A change in state law to require employees to provide notice of their intent to resign or retire by the last day of instruction in the school year would help, but no such change is imminent.
Some districts have found their own unique way to get back in the driver’s seat when it comes to hiring.
An increasing number of districts now offer incentives to encourage employees to inform them of impending retirements and resignations earlier The incentives don’t have to be large to get results, and they give district recruiters a better chance to hire the most qualified teacher candidates—those with a high level of coursework in their teaching field and excellent grades—before they find a job elsewhere.
TASB Staffing Consultant Richard Lane routinely recommends that districts put early exit incentives in place when he does a district staffing review. “The biggest reason to offer an incentive is that the applicant pool is at its strongest in March, April, and May. Toward July, the overall pool is considerably weaker,” Lane said. “What we recommend is that districts offer $500 for teachers who submit their resignations by April 1. That amount is usually enough to get teachers to participate,” Lane said. Districts are advised to include the incentive payment in the employee’s final paycheck.
El Paso ISD had considered offering an early exit incentive in prior school years but wasn’t able to put one in place until the 2009–10 school year. Marcia Daniels, El Paso ISD’s executive director of HR, said the district was primarily interested in getting early notice from teachers so it would know what positions to recruit for and to spare teachers who might have to be transferred due to population shifts the angst of not knowing where they might end up.
The district offered the incentive in January and gave employees six weeks to consider the option. Daniels would have preferred to notify employees of the option in December because the extended holiday break would have given them more time to contemplate the offer and talk their plans over with their families.
Even with limited notice, the district had 56 takers. “It’s a good start, though it’s not a lot of people for us. I think we would have had more if we would have had a little more time. We will offer the incentive earlier this year and I think we’ll get 100 resignation letters,” Daniels said.
“We wanted to contain our costs, so we said the first 100 employees that provide a resignation or retirement letter by March 15 would receive a $200 payment on their final paycheck,” Daniels said. The incentive was only for teachers that completed their contracts.
The district is big enough (it has more than 62,000 students and 9,000 teachers) to avoid teacher layoffs through attrition and by doing a detailed needs assessment—so much so that it has significantly lowered the number of teachers it needs to hire. As a result, it is able to find positions for all its surplus teachers every year, so offering the incentive did not prevent layoffs.
Some teachers just aren’t aware that letting district administrators know about their plans before the deadline is helpful. “In exit interviews, many teachers said it didn’t even occur to them that the district might have an advantage if it knows who is leaving early on. We’re trying to change our culture to say it is critically important that you let us know,” Daniels says.
The district also had some work to do with its campus administrators. Some teachers said in exit interviews that they wouldn’t provide early notice for fear of different treatment from campus administrators. “We have counseled principals not to change the way they treat people based on the fact that they provide early notice,” Daniels said. “We gave them some talking points.”
Early resignation incentives are not a tool used solely by large districts. With just over 1,050 students enrolled, Florence ISD is one of the smaller districts to try the incentive. The district’s finances were the driving factor.
The district experienced a drop in student enrollment coupled with poor daily attendance that resulted in decreased state funding. “We knew we had staffing issues, so we hired TASB to do a staffing review for the district. Lane shared incentive ideas that could possibly help us,” said Superintendent Karla Moyers.
The district decided to offer the incentive to give principals the chance to balance and restructure the staff on their campuses and fill vacancies while the applicant pool was strongest. In 2009–10, Florence ISD offered a $500 incentive to employees who submitted letters of resignation or retirement by the first week in April. The district was accustomed to receiving most of its resignation and retirement notices in July.
The incentive generated one early employee retirement notice and four early resignation notices. The district was still forced to lay off one professional employee and eliminate some paraprofessional positions, but offering the incentive did help the district save some money, an estimated $62,000.
North East ISD declared a financial exigency in the fall of 2009 and was working through a reduction-in-force (RIF) when leaders decided to offer an incentive for early resignations and retirements. The 63,000-student district was in the process of making $12 million in budget cuts.
District leaders needed to know as early as possible how many employees were leaving at the end of the year due to the notification requirements and timelines surrounding the RIF. Having information on the number of resignations and retirements to come would allow the district to draw down the number of personnel it had to reduce. Also, when the district knew how many jobs it could save through the early notices, leaders could begin the process of building their RIF lists taking seniority and other guidelines defined in policy into account.
North East offered a $1,000 early resignation incentive. The district chose to offer a bigger incentive to make it meaningful to employees and attract the largest possible number of takers. Employees were required to notify the district of their irrevocable intent to resign or retire by the last working day in January. They had to remain with the district through the end of their regular work schedule (June 4 for teachers, June 30 for others). Those leaving the district received the extra $1,000 in their paycheck after their final workweek.
By the January deadline, 171 employees had notified the district of their intent to resign or retire. In other years, the district might have had a handful of notices by that time. District leaders estimate that about 35 jobs were saved as a result of the incentive and believe that keeping those people employed was the incentive’s biggest payoff.
Waco ISD has continued its early resignation incentive. The district has taken a unique approach by structuring its incentive in such a way that those who provide early notice of their intent to resign or retire earn $50 for up to 20 days of unused leave (up to $1,000). Employees had to notify the district of their intent to resign or retire by March 1.
Structuring the incentive this way has done more than help the district find out what positions it has to fill early. District leaders believe it has discouraged retirees and veteran employees from “burning” their accumulated leave days when they know their time with the district is short.
The district’s primary reason for offering the incentive was to keep experienced teachers in the classroom through the end of the year. “All the research indicates that kids don’t get the same level of education with a substitute in the classroom,” said Teresa Sharp, Waco ISD’s supervisor of personnel services. Plus, the district avoids the cost of hiring a substitute.
Sharp says the incentive gives the district a better handle on the number of teachers it will have to hire early in the recruiting season. Before the incentive, the 15,000-student district got most of its resignations in May, which would create late hires. “Teachers were living under the old idea that they would lose their health insurance over the summer if they announced they were retiring or leaving early,” Sharp said.
The early resignation incentive has also helped district recruiters prepare for their trips. Recruiters can tell teacher candidates about actual vacancies as opposed to talking in generalities about the advantages of working for the district.
This past school year was the third year the district offered the incentive. Forty-one employees provided early notice, down from 57 in 2008–09. Sharp believes people are less likely to leave their jobs right now because of the economy and their hope that the financial markets will turn around and reinvigorate their retirement investments.
The district remains satisfied with the results of the incentive and will continue to offer it in future years.
Clearly, districts have a variety of reasons for offering early resignation incentives to encourage employees to provide early notice of their intent to leave. Paramount among them is improving their ability to attract and hire top-notch teachers before the applicant pool weakens during the summer months. Whatever the reason, early resignation incentives help districts get a handle on the hiring process.
