School district continues to wrangle with hiring, retention
The challenge of filling vacancies and finding new ways to recruit and retain employees continues to be an undertaking for the School District of Lee County.
A meeting on Nov. 15 took the Lee County School Board through different strategic plans with recruiting, developing and retaining highly effective staff through various objectives, such as reducing employee turnover and increasing the diversity of employees.
Human Resources Executive Director Robert Dodig said for October, the termination rate was 16.6% for teachers, 19.5% for support staff and 7.6% for administrators.
“Termination includes employees separated from the district voluntarily or involuntarily,” he said.
The 2023-24 target is 15% for teachers, 18% staff and 6% administrators.
For diversity, the district uses the methodology commonly used for the Unites States Census Bureau. As a whole, the diversity index for the Lee County population is 50.5%.
The school district’s student population diversity index is 64%, administration diversity at 37.3%, instructional diversity at 39.2% and non-institutional diversity is 64.8%. The numbers are from October for the district.
Dodig said they want to increase the diversity of employees. He said the support staff mirrors the data of students, while teachers and administrators fall short of the population.
The presentation also highlighted the school based instructional hires, retirements and terminations by fiscal year.
“Coming off a year in which we hired 634 instructional staff, we lost 853 instructional staff members,” Dodig said. “The gap for fiscal year ’23 is 219. Last year it was 170. This is consistent with the amount of vacant positions advertised over the last six months.”
With that said, the district opened two schools and added seats to another, which all required to be staffed.
Dodig said there were a total of 929 and 924 at the top of fiscal year 2022 and 2023 that represent the total number of employees that left the district for retirement and terminations.
The district hired 984 support staff members in 2023 and 919 non-instructional staff members left the district, which increases to 1,045 if they count retirements.
There was a small percentage of non-instructional turnovers from 36.24% to 37.72%.
Many strategies have been put into place in an effort to retain and recruit employees. For instance, the district just increased the pay rate by 8%, which was retroactive to July 1. The starting salary for teachers is now $50,000.
As far as recruiting efforts are concerned — there have been many. The district has added 25 international teachers to the district, as well as partnering with Florida SouthWestern State College and FutureMakers. The district has also attended recruitment events in Puerto Rico, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
This fall the district also implemented an internship pilot program, releasing interns early to work in vacant classrooms, enhanced social media presence with real employee stories and a new tagline of “discover your purpose, join our story.”
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