Blue Valley's lessons in retention

Workforce, Sept, 2002 by Patrick J. Kiger

The highly regarded Blue Valley School District saw ominous signs in its teacher turnover rates. In partnership with the Blue Valley National Education Association and the University of Kansas, quality and retention improved.

When Ryan Ellis walked into a high-school classroom in the Blue Valley School District in Overland Park, Kansas, for the first time last fall, he was unnerved. His dream was to get students excited about discussing The Adventures of Hucklebery Finn and other classic works of literature. He hoped to turn that passion into a career.

All the same, the rookie teacher wondered if he was up to the job, in an affluent suburban school district where administrators and parents set high standards. He promised himself that if he ever thought he wasn't making the grade, he would quit.

Blue Valley's HR department also worried about whether Ellis would succeed or fail. With student test scores that consistently rank in the top 10 percent of the nation, the district has a reputation for the academic excellence that comes with highly skilled, veteran faculty members. Blue Valley's teachers average 14 years of experience; an impressive 66 percent have advanced degrees. But since the late 1990s, administrators have been concerned about maintaining the quality of their workforce. "We ourselves never actually reached the point that we were in a crisis, but on a state and national level there were a lot of warning signs," says Sandra Chapman, Blue Valley's director of human resources staff development. Nationwide, the school-age population is surging, and the departure of baby-boom-age faculty--thanks to pension plans that allow them to retire with full benefits in their mid-50s--already is creating a dire situation. Over the next decade, public schools across the country will need 2.4 million new teachers--nearly as many as the 2.8 million presently at work in classrooms.

While college education programs are scrambling to produce graduates to meet the need, these novices have an alarmingly high washout rate. Nationwide, 30 to 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years because of poor performance or because they are disillusioned. At Blue Valley, the failure rate wasn't quite that high, but it was still troubling. In the 1998-99 school year, for example, 13 percent of the new teachers weren't rehired for the following year because of poor performance. That was nearly twice the district's overall teaching-staff turnover rate, and it meant that the district was losing new teachers at a faster rate than its veterans were retiring.

Blue Valley administrators knew that just filling those jobs with more new hires wouldn't work. Research indicates that it takes a teacher several years to develop the skills needed to reach children with different learning styles. For the school district to keep its lofty reputation intact, new hires had to stay long enough to develop into talented veterans. The problem wasn't a lack of quality applicants. Blue Valley's reputation and pay scale--the average Blue Valley teacher earned $45,000, the fourth-best compensation among Kansas school districts-attracted 10 for each opening. Instead, new teachers who should have succeeded weren't making it.

Chapman and others gradually realized that a solution would require major changes in the initiation process for teachers. In the past, rookies had plunged in with little formal help from administrators or experienced colleagues. "The old culture was sort of 'I had to survive it, so you'll have to do it, too,"' Chapman says.

Thus, Blue Valley developed the Alliance for Educational Excellence program, a new-teacher-development initiative providing orientation seminars, workplace mentoring, and continual in-the-classroom evaluation and training to help new teachers improve their performance. The program gives new teachers an opportunity to build on their academic credentials with a master's degree from the University of Kansas through a special program in which they can actually take many of their classes at Blue Valley and conduct research on issues in their own classrooms.

"The unique thing about the program is its comprehensive nature," Chapman says. "Some districts have tried various parts of this solution--peer assistance, or graduate study--but combining the elements in one package is new. Basically, we're trying to focus on the different needs that a new teacher would have, and address them all at once." Another distinctive aspect is the district's extensive use of surveys and feedback to continually monitor and improve the program's performance. Finally, the program is a product of partnership. On one level, it's an alliance that includes school-district administrators and the local teachers' union, who've put aside their sometimes divergent interests to work together, and the University of Kansas. But on another level, it also is a cooperative effort between the district's HR professionals and veteran teachers, who've been persuaded by HR to contribute many hours of work--with only modest compensation--to help their new peers.