By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
The St. Joseph School District is still searching to fill some teacher positions just ahead of the start of the new school year.
Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Brian Kraus says the district is trying to be creative in their ways of recruiting teachers.
"Whether that's people in the community who have bachelor's degrees in something else that might want to become teachers, we have our grow your own program, and our pathway to teaching program," Kraus said during the district's annual back to school news conference. "We're bringing in some international teachers, se we're doing everything we can to alleviate the problem."
Kraus says there are still six or seven open teaching positions, including one critical need for a science teacher at Central High School.
Kraus says it's a balancing act of sorts to make sure that critical teaching positions are filled.
"If we have a building where we have three sections of 15, maybe we can combine that to two sections if we need an Elementary teacher for instance," Kraus explains. "We look at master schedules and see if there's an enrollment of five or six in several classes, we look at do we need to offer those or can we shift it to a higher need."
Kraus says there are a number of factors that go into the difficulty of recruiting teachers as districts all over are facing the same staffing problems.
"Some of it is geography, some of it is pay, some of it is perceived working conditions, there's a lot of factors that go into determining where someone is going to want to land as far as a teaching spot," Kraus points out. "Weve been working as hard as we can to make our salary schedule competitive and then other factors that go along with that."
The district did fill several teaching positions by hiring 140 new teachers, including some during a hiring fair earlier this summer.
The first day of school for the St. Joseph School District is on Monday.
You can follow Matt on Twitter @KFEQMatt and St. Joseph Post @StJosephPost.