Three Key Strategies for District Leaders to Create a Resilient Teacher Workforce

Key points:

Teachers are more important to student achievement than any other aspect of schooling. Investigation shows that “when it comes to student performance on reading and math tests, teachers are estimated to have two to three times the effect of any other school factor, including services, facilities, and even leadership.” Yet despite this significant impact, too often district strategies focus on interventions that prioritize students and their achievement, while educators are left with the same supports and resources amid ever-rising expectations. .

Students matter AND district leaders must prioritize caring for the adults who care for children.

As a superintendent for over 11 years, I have seen more often than not that comprehensive resources for teachers beyond professional development or mentoring opportunities rarely exist. To support and build a healthy educator workforce, we must modernize K-12 human resources that take into account the well-being and resilience of educators. This type of systematic change can really make a difference not only for educators but also for the students, families, and communities they serve.

At the Olmsted Falls School District, our leadership team understands how critical it is to support our educators as employees. Nationally, 40 percent of school division leaders and directors describe their current staffing shortages as “severe” or “very serious.” Fortunately, while our school district is not struggling with staffing shortages at the level of our neighboring districts, that may not always be the case. With more teachers considering leaving the classroom and the change of professions, along with Fewer teachers considering the profession.We would be foolish to ignore what is happening around us.

Instead of taking a Band-Aid approach and plugging holes in the process by hiring more and more teachers, our team has focused on building our schools as a place where educators want to work and thrive. We have the opportunity to create an environment where our current educators are satisfied employees, providing them with the support and resources our staff need to feel and operate as valued members of our district.

By taking this approach, we are not only seeing a decrease in turnover, keeping our teachers in our district, but we are simultaneously attracting new, high-quality teachers who want to be part of our community; teachers are even looking to our district as a place to work.

To create this type of work environment, district leaders must understand the physical and mental health and resilience of their educators, just as they do with their students. Here are my top three best practices for K-12 leaders to create a resilient workforce:

Use data to understand your employees' strengths and needs. Data-backed initiatives to support teacher wellbeing and resilience are critical. District leaders no longer need to feel overwhelmed or guess when it comes to creating a customized workforce strategy that meets the specific needs of their schools. Platforms like peoplebankan HRTech solution, allows district leaders to easily survey and benchmark their teaching workforce and gain key insights into how to create supportive strategies that drive impact and create a modernized environment for teaching and learning.

For example, I regularly see the toll that daily grind takes on the mental health and well-being of our teachers, and this has been a major factor in educators' decisions about whether to stay or leave the profession. I no longer need to wait for teachers to resign to understand that teachers in my district are stressed and burned out. With data in hand, I can proactively and directly hear from educators across the district about the growing stressors they face. And with that information, Olmsted is in the process of becoming more strategic in implementing essential supports for processing stress in healthy ways.

Encourage conversations among school leaders to support well-being. Whether your district has 3 or 300 schools, it is essential to fully understand how individual schools operate. As they develop a data-backed, district-level workforce resilience plan, district leaders should work to foster and coordinate conversations among school leaders and administrators. It is these conversations that can foster a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences between schools and their specific needs.

At Olmsted, we are working to better incorporate comprehensive, data-backed human resources strategies into our district-wide strategic plan. And as we create this plan for the district, we are having conversations with each of our school leaders to ensure the plan can be executed effectively in their unique school environment.

This direct line of knowledge about how schools work day to day, and their perspective and feedback, are more than valuable to the success of developing educators' resilience.

Identify unique funding sources available to support workforce resilience. Federal COVID relief dollars have allowed schools and districts to implement school-based initiatives, including those that support educators. With these dollars set for expire In September 2024, district leaders must understand their districts' budgets and what external funding opportunities are available for their schools.

For example, at Olmsted we use the state Department of Education's tool. Support for the impact of disadvantaged students and funds for student well-being and success to fund our workforce resilience efforts. As noted by the Ohio Department of Education, “districts and schools use disadvantaged student impact support and student well-being and success funds to provide vital wrap-around services to help students overcome the challenges.” learning obstacles, accelerate learning, and prepare for future success.” And because educators play such a critical role in student learning and success, these types of funds align with supporting educators. District leaders must monitor and stay up to date on the latest public and private funds available to them.

Evidence-based, data-backed HR strategies have helped our district become even better: creating a workplace that naturally retains people and attracts great people, while creating incredible employee educators who, at the same time, in turn, they foster student success. While we are still in the early stages of this approach, I firmly believe that workforce resilience and well-being will be our strongest recruitment and retention tool for our teachers today and for our future workforce.