001Hello. Welcome to the St. Rain Valley School District Board of Education study session of February 18th, 2026. Sarah, will you please call the roll? Sure. Mrs. Babs? Present. Mr. Berthold? Present. Mrs. Gilligan? Present. Mrs. Horanek? Here. Mr. Luchuga? Here. Mrs. Solomon? Here. Mrs. Weiss? Here. Thank you. On the agenda this evening, we have HR recruitment, retention, and hiring. Amanda, take it away. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I'd first like to introduce our team here today who's supported in all of the data that went in to this study session. So first of all, we have Amy Keene. She is one of our directors of human resources and she actually is responsible for the very large task of reporting all of our employment data to CDE each year. So we're really grateful for her. So
002she brings a lot of expertise in this area and of course Dr. Brian Young, one of our executive directors as well, who partners with us and is a large part of all of our teacher pathways and recruitment processes. As you know, as we think of our strategic priorities, many of these are applicable today but especially outstanding teachers and staff and then you'll see in our retention area as well staff well-being. So first of all, it's important to understand the different ways to calculate turnover data and the way that CDE, the Colorado Department of Education calculates turnover data, is interesting actually. So it's a snapshot into two different years. So CDE's turnover data represents employee turnover from December 1 of one year. So for example, 2023 to December 1 of 2024. That is the 2025 turnover
003rate. Other things to be mindful of is it excludes, I had a correction, it excludes temporary positions but it includes all employees, regular positions, charter school employees included, and turnover is also inclusive of movement away from a position, transfers into another role, moving up in a promotional position, and also leaving the district. So any kind of movement out of a position is considered turnover and we are pleased and you'll see on the next slide that St. Vrain's overall turnover rate and teacher turnover rate is the lowest in the state as compared to other districts. Before we see the larger chart of data, Amy, would you please share of the examples of Yeah, so all the different areas that we report, the administrators obviously is the assistant superintendent and executive directors in all the different departments
004and areas. Crafts and trades are operations and including transportation and nutrition services. Instructional support which can include the counselors, media consultants, behavior specialists, our office and administrative support staff, all the school staff that you think about, department secretaries, principal secretaries, attendance clerks, and then we have our special services providers like occupational therapists, physical therapists, SLPs, those are special service providers, paraprofessionals, all of our instructional specialized program paras, special ed paras, lab techs, principals will include APs and principals and then all of professional other is a lot of our professional technical district technology type stuff. So I believe this was slide seven before in the slide deck that you have, we've reordered this and just moved this one in front of as the larger snapshot. So this is a comparison of every employee group, those large
005categories with all of our major school districts. So this is a metro area comparison and you'll see St. Brain is highlighted in the bluish purple all the way down and then to that very far right we have the state average. So when we're looking at turnover, we not only compare ourselves to ourselves year over year, we also compared to the state average and also to the top 10 school districts and then our neighboring school districts. And you'll see that St. Brain's overall total staff turnover rate is at 14.48% which is the lowest of all of the categories, all of the other school districts and then also lower, much lower than the state average. And as you look at each of the categories, the employee categories, we are also the lowest as compared to the state
006average so we're lower than the state average as well. Important to note, professional other, we're at 9.20 which also is the lowest. We are also at a 10% classroom teacher turnover rate which we're very proud of that as well. And in many other categories, we are lower than our peer districts even though for example you would look at crafts trades and services at 20.4% that seems high compared to some of those lower numbers. However, remember that means movement away from a position to another position, could transfer to another location, you could apply for a transfer to another position, you could move up in a position and that is all counted as turnover. And as you compare crafts trades and services at St. Brain's 20%, you'll notice that other districts are higher than that or within
007the ballpark. Regardless, we'll continue to study and look at all of our turnover data and make sure that there's always areas of improvement and we do have many areas to celebrate. I have a quick question and this is more of a why. Why do they use to calculate turnover rate just like promotion moving within the district? Like I understand moving out or leaving that type of thing. Why do they use that? Do you know the rationale? I don't know the rationale Amy, do you know? No, I mean they look at job class that it's all numbers, you know, a principal is a 105, assistant principal is a 106, so they're using the state code. So it's anything, any movement from one state code to another, they consider that turnover. So a teacher is a 201,
008they could be moved to an assistant principal, they move, they consider that turnover. They don't look at that it stayed within the district, they're just specifically looking at those specific positions as the turnover. And that's something that we're happy to look into and talk to our contacts about that too. I'm just curious, I mean again you would think most, I mean I understand leaving a district and retiring or something like that being turnover, but within the district and promotions it almost seems like it's skewed data to me. That just seems very skewed. You bring up a great point. And you'll see as we continue on, we are starting to develop our own set of turnover data that consists of people leaving. That's going to be my second question. And I'm not saying what they're collecting
009is wrong because there could be a reason, that's why I was asking why did they collect that. So there could be a reason as to why that, but without knowing that reason, that data seems like it could be skewed a bit. Happy to look into that though. This is just a piece of the former slide and just isolating our overall turnover rate. So that bottom number on the chart and again showing that St. Breen's turnover rate is at 14.48% as compared to other school districts that are at 16 or above. This isolates our teacher turnover rate per CDE's calculation. And again St. Breen is at 10% turnover rate which is a really strong, our teachers stay and we're really pleased with that. We know that Pooder was 0.67 higher than us and for that set
010of data and overall we're again extremely pleased. This gives us some positive feedback about our teachers because they stay. And a 10% turnover rate is typically seen as natural attrition, yes? Yes, yes. So that's typically what we see in organizations that just have natural attrition like retirements, people leaving to go on maternity leave or to stay home with their children. So 10% is something we or lower is something we strive for. Yes, thank you. So as we shift into what we're starting to devise ourselves and to calculate is St. Breen's turnover. So this will be encompassing a holistic school year from July 1 to June 30 and we would reflect all of our certified staff, those special services providers as well, exclude charters since we do not control the hiring processes for that that group
011of schools. We exclude our temporary employees, our one-year-only contracts and movement and promotions. We're truly looking at who left. As we look at this set of data, we'll continue to grow in this and add more over time. It's important to know that right now as we did this for the first time and report it out to all of you, this was all manual. So in some very savvy data systems, you have dashboards, you can click on it, it gives you all the reasons and lots of data quickly. Amy, thank you so much. Amy pulled reports, looked manually name by name and then we looked at the corresponding employment documents with it to see if we had reasons and thank you for your many many hours to help us with these slides today. Over time we'll
012continue as our systems get smarter but this was a very manual process and we're pleased to bring you what we have today. So this is a turnover of those individuals who left by school year and so as we look at our major categories, so principal groups, for example in the 20, 25, 20, this would be last year for the start of this year for the people who left and were not here at the beginning of this school year, we had one administrator and we do know that that person left the area. Assistant principals four, certified 173 or 7.9, so some natural attrition, a lot of retirements, some moving out of the area. Classified 12%, so when you look at 189 out of over 1500, that's great numbers and we also see retirements, people moving into
013different roles, moving out of the area and then professional technical 10. Overall as you look historically, we've got 10% turnover, overall 11 and 9% which is again natural for an organization and we'll continue to study this data and also evolve our exit surveys. When we're looking at why individuals are leaving, our top reasons are retirement, personal reasons, moved out of the area or someone from our non-teaching and non-educator categories went to move to a different company. Is there any background on the spike in principals from the prior year? Do we, and I don't know if we go back any further, but do you, is that a cyclical thing or is it something that we track to like know we have, you know, this, we have maybe a lot that are going to retire this coming
014year or something like that? I mean are you tracking that information? Yeah, we do. We have a lot of stability in St. Rain, but that also causes people to kind of age out in groups and we have some of that and we have some of that this year. That's what I've heard. So I was just kind of wondering like what the process is for monitoring that and sort of future planning. Yeah, I look a lot at the succession planning especially for departments, for schools as well in terms of, you know, we have a large number of assistant principals and deans in our system. Many of those are being tapped for these next opportunities. So what we really try to do is a lot of crossover training in departments especially. As we have departments beginning to
015age out, we try to bring in directors and executive directors who are 10 to 15 years younger but still have really good experience at the school level to begin that cross training under the current assistant superintendent. So we're pretty solid in that space in terms of departments centrally and also have a lot of choice at the school level for our retired principals because of the number of assistant principals and deans that we have kind of in the pipeline. Okay, we'll shift into just looking at our overall number of St. Rain employees and Amy will share about this as well and you'll notice the total number is might look a little different than what we advertise and there's a reason behind that and I'll have Amy share. So it's interesting when people ask for data because
016we get those kind of calls and requests all the time. It can vary depending on what people are asking. When we look at the total number of employees, if we just look at active people, it can be 6,400 people when we consider everybody, all the subs, all the charter school people, that number can be as high as 64, 45. When we think about, when we take out the charter school people and we take out what we call non-employees, we have contract workers that work in our building like special ed teachers and when we think about our athletic trainers, those kind of people who are non-employees but are in our system and using our systems, that number is 58, 63 and then when we think about just the FCE employees, that's what this number represents when
017we're with somebody that has a regular position that they're in all the time and then when people ask about our certified staff, I always have to clarify that because sometimes they're just wanting to know teachers or our certified staff can include like our SLPs and our OTs and our PTs and psychs and such and that can differ from our certified staff right now is 2,000 over 2,000, 2,041 but when we just look at teachers, it's right around 1,700. So when we get those requests, it is interesting because I have to clarify what do you really want, what are the numbers that you're looking at because it can really vary and it varies from day to day as far as people resigning and we may have a pair that leaves and we hire two nutrition services,
018that number changes every day and so there's times with over 5,000 employees, that is a true number and there's times where if we have someone out on leave and we have to hire someone into their place because they're out on maternity leave, that counts as a hire and so it is all, as you all know being savvy and data yourselves, it is all in how you ask the question so when people call HR and say well can you tell us how many employees we have and we have about seven questions asked back of them to make sure that we are honing in on that data set that they need and again someday with a savvier data system, it's a two-second poll versus Amy drilling down and pulling from reports to compile that together. I know
019that's not part of this conversation but Justin, I think our meeting before last, they talked about the technology so it's probably more of a techie question. Would this be a part of that business mod plan? Yes. Yes, it's front and center of the business mod plan, HR and finance systems. We're very excited about that, yes. Thank you Amy. We shared a lot of what you're going to see next at Leadership St. Brain and we're pleased to bring this before you again. As we think of hiring, recruitment and retention, we are pleased to share that we are very competitive when it comes to teacher compensation, all employee compensation frankly, but teacher compensation is what this slide represents and this year our base salary is $64,500 and that definitely does help us continue to recruit and retain
020the very best employees, the very best teachers and it's our goal to continue to remain competitive out there and as we have our state job fair coming up posted here in St. Brain, that will be front and center for us to share and we're very proud as well that we are one of Forbes' best in-state employers in the top school district in Colorado. As we look at, I think you've seen this at Leadership St. Brain in a pie chart that was really hard to read, some of the numbers and so we turn this into a graph and this represents our local hires, so certified hires, our teacher and special services providers for those in this school year as we hired last spring for this school year. These are all the individuals from in state and
021we hired pretty much as you all of the blue bars represent school districts and the red tone represents in-district hires, whether that's from a substitute pool, paraprofessional that we grew into a teacher and our student teacher hires and so with over 21 that we grew within our own system into the teaching profession, you'll see that other districts such as Adams 12, I know that they're having some enrollment decline and we are fortunate to gain 16 teachers and 12 from Boulder Valley, for example six from other areas, so other organizations might be the business world who would be teaching one of our high school courses as an alt-ed teacher. We would hire from hospitals some of our speech paths, our psychologists, but we are seeing that St. Brain is definitely on the map from a recruitment
022perspective and we are really pleased at the opportunities that we provide for our teachers and for our students which individuals are seeking us out in our recruitment efforts. When we have started a new hire data set we were asking our new hires that's self-selected now we'd like to make it mandatory and coming into to the next school year, why did you come why did you come to St. Brain tell us more and we're really pleased to hear that from someone from who came from another school district that I'm just going to read it as the best opportunity to come to St. Brain and so far it's their best experience that they've had out of teaching another three districts and they're admirable about programming for students and they see that in St. Brain we invest in
023our people and they appreciate our innovation as well. One of our parents and who was a leadership St. Brain member and new hire was a teacher elsewhere and decided through some of our presentations and the great work of the district to convert their teaching license and come back to teach and we're really excited about that. We also recruit out-of-state knowing that there's not always enough candidate pools within state as we compete against other school districts and we hired 31 out-of-state teachers and the stars represent the states that we recruited that we went to job fairs although we didn't yield hires from each of those states it's important to know that sometimes it takes a few years to build that pipeline get our name out and build those connections and where we see our best benefit
024for example in Oregon we've been there for I'm going to say at least four years there's a large consortium fair of over a thousand candidates coming from Washington California all the surrounding states that go to this Oregon fair where we've seen that we're able to hire three individuals is we invite them out after we meet them they come out to visit we tour them around our schools introduce them to our leaders they walk around with our principals and HR leaders and it gives them that face-to-face opportunity they really get to see our classrooms and our schools and really feel the great culture and climate as well and through that we hired three from Oregon and so we find that is our continued success and that's will be part of our continued strategy we naturally see
025individuals coming to us from Texas that's just what we see we see educators coming from Texas to Colorado and we're glad that they have chosen st. brain as well we hired six individuals so we're beginning to drill down to each of these so the darkest blue represents the most hires and then the lightest blue would be at least one higher so we'll continue to track this and look at patterns and that will help advise us as well as where to recruit continue to recruit we're watching trends as well we did see that in Illinois a handful of years ago their retirement switched and we're seeing an influx of individuals from Illinois well now they're offering incentives for teachers to stay and loan payoffs and things and so we're seeing less of that influx but we're
026still pleased that we were able to hire anything else to recruit outside the country as well not this time there's a few school districts that do but we don't when we're talking to our new hires of reasons that are moving to Colorado as we all know it's a beautiful place to be the lifestyle climate a job relocation of a family member to come back to home home state or to be closer to family and specifically for st. brain better support for teachers and great opportunities when we studied our employees and the data and just it was a just a question how many employees do live and work in st. brain because from some of our new hires and they are their kids go to our schools and what a great opportunity for their them to
027the the parents to work for us as well overall 73 percent of our employees live within our school district boundaries and our top two employee categories with the most individuals our teachers and our classified staff and the majority of our classified staff at 85 percent and 65 percent of our teachers live and work in our district. Yeah thank you good evening everyone something we do really well here in st. brain is growing our own and we do that through our partnerships with with universities and local organizations as well as pathways that we have built intentionally to to grow our own workforce and if you haven't heard of our p teach program that's modeled after our p tech program with our partnership with UC Denver we offer both current high school students and current classified employees
028up to 52 credit hours of coursework related towards earning a bachelor's in the field of education absolutely free so we have many of our high school students doing this we have many of our paraprofessionals that are interested in becoming teachers that don't have their bachelor's degree yet taking advantage of this opportunity and again all of this is free of charge our teachers most of them are all in-house folks that are also our success coaches supporting our young mentors and our young teachers. We have a strong mentor program starting with student teachers the moment you become a student teacher in st. brain you get st. brain coaching st. brain mentorship st. brain professional development on the latest and greatest of instructional practices behavior management etc that leads you right into our one-of-a-kind induction program and ongoing
029mentorship that you go through and and even then your professional development opportunities continue to be offered to all of our staff members from there we offer five different master's degrees programs for our student or should be for our teachers again partnering with University of Colorado Denver in reading culturally and linguistically diverse technology and learning as far as well as a principal licensure program we even have a partnership with UC Denver for a doctoral program in educational leadership we have many of our staff members taking advantage of that we partner with all of our local universities especially with their schools of education around recruiting fairs we go and do guest speakers we do training with them that one of our partners from my from our department Sarah James is doing a zoom meeting with all the
030student teachers at Colorado State University getting them ready to go with our with our hiring season practicums etc and then we attend every one of our high school career events as well not just for teaching positions but for all of our classified and non-certified positions as well when we look at those that have come through our internal pathways some of this will be redundant so I'll go quickly through it last year we had 60 student teachers as Amanda said we were able to hire 16 of them back into our system this year we had 37 students teachers in the fall semester we have another 32 student teachers this semester we so since the beginning of our p-tech program we've hired six of those folks that are now teaching in our schools we've had a lot
031of folks that have come back to our system as well ten of our new hires this year were former st. Vrain grads we had 33 staff members that are we rehired back into our system so they were here they left they realized st. Vrain is absolutely the place to be and came back to us and as Amanda said we were able to hire five folks that came either as a guest teacher or a paraprofessional in our system we also take advantage of a lot of our alternative licensure pathways that we offer we have ten teachers that we've recently hired from our gen ed alternative licensure program we know that special education is a hard-to-fill area and so we have created and partnered to build our own special ed alternative licensure program with 18 teachers from
032that and we have five that are going through a special ed endorsement program meaning they already have a teaching license we're just getting the necessary coursework so they can earn that special ed credential yeah so the ten grads who were hired as teachers this year they weren't necessarily in the p-teach program no they were just they graduated and decided to go off they went through a traditional four-year college program became certified and then came back yes when we see it at our board meetings when we have our students come up and share that they want to be teachers we go find them and say come back and teach in our district you want you to student teach with us so we are very excited when we asked those 33 hey what brought you back to
033st. Vrain and we look at that survey data that's what this slide shows you a lot of it is repeat for why people come to st. Vrain to begin with they grew within the district or they were in a position already and they wanted to stay here they loved working for st. Vrain before and they returned after they were either starting a family many people love the idea of teaching in the same system where their kids are going to school where they're living as you saw with Amanda's graphic with the percentage high percentage of folks that live within our attendance area many of the folks just have great experiences before and one to return to st. Vrain and last but not least it one says this is a great district they love our community they're
034positive about our strategic priorities and the direction of of st. Vrain as well as our strong district finances so that's from within our system as Amanda mentioned we do a lot of recruiting we're very active in that role in HR as well we attend every in-state recruiting event education recruiting event that all of our universities up and down the front range offers and we attend those many of them happen multiple times a year so we do them in the fall and we repeat them again in the spring as Amanda said we go out of state as well we're adding in addition to Oregon Wyoming Texas we're also going to Arizona this year which will be a new state that we hope to build a pipeline in the past Arizona has now allowed outside states to
035come in to their recruiting they're trying to keep everyone out in house and so now that they've opened it up we're hoping to get a good pipeline going there and then as Amanda mentioned as well we are excited st. Vrain will be hosting the Colorado Educator Educator Recruitment Fair which is the largest in-state hiring event of the year and it's going to be held at Frederick High School this year we'll have 60 school districts present we'll have over 300 candidates and they're going to see firsthand the great things going on in st. Vrain and we watch the candidates enrollment weekly and we're seeing that there's multiple out-of-state candidates as well that are flying in yep so that's a great opportunity for st. Vrain you know our recruitment is not just isolated to our certified staff
036to our teachers we do a lot of classified recruitment as well this gets done through market studies and analysis that we do on a rotating basis with departments to make sure that our compensation and our benefits and our job descriptions align with neighboring districts we do a lot of advertising in our communications department I point at Carrie because her team does incredible work helping us with advertising you've seen signs and banners and billboards and stickers on school buses as well as our websites using social media job boosting sites etc we even host our own internal certified job fair it happened in the fall and all of our classified departments have representatives there we're excited that we're even starting to build partnerships with Workforce Boulder County and Workforce Weld County to tap into some of their
037classified job events when you look at all of our retention strategies how do we keep such high retention numbers and what keeps people here really breaks down into four categories first and foremost employee compensation and benefits when you're offering the highest starting salary of the large ten districts in our state a comprehensive benefits program partnering with para wellness opportunities that's that's a that's probably the people's number one thing that they look for as far as why they want to stay we do a lot around engaging our employees in the work that we do we've got a very visible and accessible superintendent who's connecting with staff members at Teacher Advisory Council Classified Advisory Council we have a classified meet and confer committee we have a benefits committee we do our staff surveys around perception and climate
038and benefits we invite our staff to participate in interview committees and school decision-making processes we do a lot of recognition events we'll have our Teacher of the Year event coming up soon in partnership with the Ed Foundation in the fall we do our outstanding classified and professional tech tech employees of the year celebration here in a month or so we're recognizing our employees that have been in same frame for over 25 years we have our retirement celebration we do a lot of employee check-ins which I'll get to in a little bit as well as our recognitions we do with staff inspires and many of the other programs that are out there as I mentioned before we offer a lot of professional learning and growth that not only does that and provide support for them in
039their work it also provides opportunities for salary advancement something new we did this year and I credit Ty Valentine one of our HR teammates with this is we went out and visited with every single one of our new teachers new to same-frame teachers and just did a quick check-in how are you doing how's your year going do you feel supported what supports do you need how else can we help how else can we make the transition go easier for you and overwhelmingly our staff our new staff are so excited to be here they feel so supported whether they're brand new teachers and new to the profession whether the folks that return back to same-frame everybody raved about from induction to the onboarding process to the support they got at the not just the school level
040but the district level as well and you can see some of the testimonies from some of our new teachers Kara is one of our teachers from Oregon that we met at the Oregon job fair Kara is at Mead Middle School she is from a local she's a local hire Allison from Frederick she was in the out-of-state hire from Florida and you can see each one of them is enjoying their opportunities in same-frame and it feels like the transmissions gone very smoothly and we're not done right we continue to innovate we continue to look at new ideas and new ways so we are adding a teacher degree apprenticeship program as the state has made opened up this opportunity same-frame will become a state approved apprenticeship agency we're building a teacher apprenticeship program where we will take
041folks as employees as paras and provide mentorship and again they will earn a bachelor's degree and become certified teachers this will expand to other departments we have apprentices in our technology department we have them in our maintenance department and other classified departments in our in our district we continue to increase our online presence and social media presence we are as Amanda said looking at how else can we collect data given the systems we have in place how else are we tracking our new teachers and new staff members are coming in and at the same time when folks are leaving how are we gaining that information about why they're leaving our system to help us enhance our processes and again enhancing our classified recruitment as well with partnerships with Boulder County and Wild County workforce programs
042quick question going back to the first bullet or explanation there how is the degree apprenticeship program different from the P teach program what's the differences really I mean I know what an apprenticeship apprenticeship is but how are they do the programs different going through the apprenticeship program they will not do the exact same coursework that they will through the P teach program they actually are folks that are in a P teach program they're working for us but they don't need to be or some are high school students that are taking those college level courses our apprentices will start with us as employees and as they're working a part-time job mostly as a instructional pair or a special ed pair we provide training and mentorship as they work through which then guides them through their student
043teaching and then gets them to the point of being coming a teacher of record so it's just a different pathway they're very similar but the coursework requirements are different and sometimes what you see in other places is if you are going to go through an apprenticeship program or get to your student teaching you would need to resign your position and not have any earnings while you student teach full time this allows for our employees as they're developing into teachers to actually maintain a paid position work on your college coursework have mentorship and coaching and when you get to a certain level of that apprenticeship program you would be a teacher of record with lots of mentorship and support kind of like our alternative licensure program employees our apprenticeship program is a four a minimum four-year
044program there's four levels you have to go through to get to that point whereas P teach is not necessarily based on meeting the standards of the level it's more on the coursework I mean the requirements the another big difference as funding our district does an amazing job of looking at lots of different I could bore you with the difference between t-rep funding and t-dap funding and so forth and so because of these different funding sources that are all designed to help people enter the field of education we tailor the programs based on the needs of the funding source as well and I'm just trying to understand that not trying to date no you're asking so I'm hearing the difference between the programs but what would be if if someone wanted to decide between the programs
045what is the why would I take this program versus the other one where I could get a bachelor's degree versus an apprenticeship I think it could be different right there's there's a lot of different scenarios right so for example in p-teach and let me pause very quick are you talking like just for our paras that are doing this program just for like a para or this is just for para but can the para also do the p-teach program as well not they they can we've had a couple but really p-teach is for our for our high school students and then we have older adults who start as paras and they may not want to go back through with you know like high school students so this offers them a different pathway why they can continue
046to work in their jobs and be more in an adult learner setting okay so maybe I missed that one so p-teach is more for the student but can an adult who is a para take the p-teach course we have we've had a couple who have done some more than that and in the teacher degree apprenticeship program they do get a degree it's just a different way of getting it okay most of the teaching folks through p-teach choose to end up ultimately going through a four-year college type program the our apprenticeship program will not be that way it's ongoing it's four years minimum many will take longer than that to complete because they're working at the same time some of them have families they have kids at home you know it's just a it's a more
047flexible pathway and we are we're available if you have any questions I usually do yeah with the p-teach program oh go ahead sorry no no you go ahead with the with the p-teach program how many credits college 42 42 times up to 42 it depends on really how motivated they are whether we can fit everything into their schedules but some have grad graduated high school with up to 42 credit hours that's all towards it towards your bachelor's degree for free for free I'll give you if it's okay I'll give you a personal anecdote my daughter who just graduated from Mary High School left with over 30 college credits and when she walked into her university they were blown away they're like we have never seen anybody come in with this many college credits before and
048they basically had to tailor and customize her her course load because of how far advanced she was my son's experiencing the same thing okay yeah yeah p-tech would be very similar yeah I like that we have various options that individuals can choose for okay and it goes back quite a few slides but hmm I'm interested in the concept of the induction and the different levels there may be based on who we have how do you determine that I mean you have people that are coming in like I know me high school has cleansed up and he's coming to learn to teach and so he's you know in that forget the name of it I'll have a GCR going on because of so many names that you guys throw out that you know it just floats
049in there and then you have you have contractors who come in and I think it's so important if they're gonna be in St. Vrain that they all get that's a same level of how do you what do you do to get your benefits and what do you do onboarding if you have it's on boarding and beyond that even it's it's it's it's an onboarding thing but that first year's to be in our district is critical because it's so much that it's important that they know and it's also important to us because then they take on the St. Vain approach and they get an understanding of how we approach this certain discrepancies or certain confrontations or different things and so that I mean it it was in there as induction is something you do but then
050you know I'm curious what the levels of that are and who makes the decisions and what because I know that I know that's a funding issue yeah so I know that I understand that because people who are doing the induction training and stuff like that get extra hours to be able to help these people become I'll say at St. Vain I mean we are an organization that prides itself on continuity from the top to the bottom and people come from other districts or coming from other disciplines are having grain in them different different approaches so that's sort of important to me because I know it's a big issue because they know it involves funding I know it involves time and so I'm just curious about some of those people who just don't come in as
051a teacher it's a great question so it's and it is very tiered it is tiered our Office of Professional Development does an incredible job something they've started doing the last few years is we partner new teacher orientation with our district teach to reach conference so we actually have our new teachers and our experienced teachers working and learning together and then we differentiate so our Office of Professional Development takes our novice teachers our year one two three teachers and they get this package of induction and not and it's not just an induction which are those days before it's they get a higher level of they get an instructional coach and a more mentorship hours throughout the course of the school year and then we have those tiers as Jackie mentioned where the more experience you bring
052to us we don't we don't have to spend as much time doing the instructional practices we just need to teach you more the St. Vain way and make sure you have a mentor throughout the course of the year to understand our process there are induction seminars that happen that teach both practices and teach just st. brain expectations so there are a lot of touch points with new employees and honestly one of the best quotes I've ever heard is that teachers new teachers are inducted into the profession whether we plan for it or not and it's true you every employee is inducted into the profession whether we plan for it or not so the investment in the planning and the resources for induction are really important and there they continue to be a priority for us
053because teachers will ultimately reach out for any amount of help they can get and sometimes the folks that they reach out to may or may not teach in their content areas or may not themselves have a grasp on on all the things and so that's why we really do plan for every single level of experience and we have a full curriculum for induction a full curriculum for orientation orientation is what Neosha is the onboarding piece and then this teach to reach piece is pretty incredible because our teachers spend about anyone new to st. Vain spends about three days with a lot of teachers who have worked in st. Vain for a number of years and so that is some pretty powerful learning I think I was working their way through all the different programs that
054we have because they're different and they don't interact yeah which we all know is something we're working on but that's going to take a long time to get around but so they come in and is you have to be able to manipulate yeah to be able to and then Jim at the school level the principals also plan in induction for each individual school because schools have uniqueness in how they do their processes and their practices and so oftentimes a principal or an assistant principal meets once a month with the new teachers just in that building they're busy our new teachers are busy mm-hmm and we also you know from a nuts and bolts perspective we meet with all of our new hires in this room and it's ongoing we have we have onboarding trainings and
055are accessible all of the time to help everyone learn how do they get paid and how do I fill this out and who do I call for this yeah okay and then so then as a secondary part of my question is contractors we bring we bring in contractors to fill gaps okay are they addressed the same way we have temporary contractors for short periods of time often they're for leave situations if someone is on a health leave or and that's not intended for a long-term position we would there that I would say they're their biggest gain is connecting at that school level to make sure they have what they need and understand the school's norms because they are in there for a shorter period of time not the full school year and also many of
056our contractors have previously worked in st. right so we often when a principal or an administrator has to go out we'll bring in a retired administrator as a contracted service to provide support substitute teachers have a lot of onboarding and also some professional development to support them going into classrooms second that was a secondary part you've already answered it and then Secondly is that contractors like custodians they have training we we often use temp services or contracted for positions we can't fully hire out and then they have a whole onboarding and training process as well okay and can I add we hire a lot of those people too that have been contracted contractors in one you know as a custodian or as a somebody in a classroom and we've hired them too because they I
057think they see st. brain is a great place to work thank you good questions thanks I don't ask many could be it haven't been in in district and having experienced the different all these different positions and functions from principal from a superintendent on down to custodian you know I've been involved with all those people over time and you hear things that they say or don't not sure of an asset that that's why I brought that up because it's a it's a broad spectrum it's actually a huge spectrum and that's one thing you don't want to let people fall into cracks in any of that any of that process so that's a big job you guys have a load on your hands when you're talking about this number of people 5,000 employees and many new ones
058do we have and who's new to the whole concept and it's a challenge I mean it's and it's the basis it keeps us functional and it gives us as board members we ability to set back and relax and know that all this is being done and you know on occasion something's going to happen but you know we're ready to address it so thank you any other questions well I just want to say thank you I know this was a manual process it sounds like so I appreciate how much work went into sharing this information and I look forward to seeing what those new hopefully databases in the future help maybe make your job a little easier but this is really helpful and the information is really beneficial so thank you just one more statement I've
059been fortunate enough through leadership same frame to see a lot of this information that's why I go because you can never learn enough and every day I learn something new in this district so you can't keep up with it really it's every this concept but I've seen I've seen a presentation on how when you go to recruit the mat the information you give out about us in comparisons and the job numbers I think that's phenomenal because you know people don't talk about that's a show they only get they only work seven months a year eight months a year and that he had a yada that way you all approach it as a yearly concept and the jobs that we offer people can work almost all year in the business of how that makes your money
060go up and all those different things I just I just think when you go recruiting you've got to be presenting stuff to people that they're not hearing from other districts and that's another reason why just not the salary the other stuff that you present about how the salary comes to you and you know how it compares to what you're getting elsewhere and it was this it's amazing to me it's a level of confidence that when you're going out you're you're laying out some really amazing data and statistics and trends that kind of people hit people right between the eyes if they're sitting with other districts that are not it is sophisticated. Put it in our drone show. I can't really guess what this number is so I have people looking at us. It's just a
061compliment to what I know I know what you're doing out there when recruiting and why we're getting these teachers that are so anxious to be here and that makes them wanting to get in and that builds up that builds our continuity even more so it's so important. And it's that personal approach that we're very proud of. Yeah well thanks yeah it's very reassuring to see the data and where we stand and the statewide stuff so thank you for that. Let's see our next meeting I don't think we have anything else for this evening right no that's it so our next meeting is Wednesday February 25th we have a study session at 515 followed by a regular meeting at 6 with that I'll request a motion to adjourn. So moved. All in favor? Aye. Second. Oh
062I almost forget the second I'm sorry.