Hiring quality teachers

Starr Rowe
Published: August 16, 2008

As the opening of school draws nearer, hiring quality teachers to fill vacancies becomes more challenging. Culpeper County Public Schools staff has had an extremely busy summer advertising, interviewing and hiring for vacancies as current staff resignations and requests for release from contracts continued to be submitted.

As costs, especially fuel, have continued to climb and with teacher salaries frozen, more and more staff sought positions closer to where they lived and potential new staff looked at housing, fuel, and child care in Culpeper to determine if they could afford to come here. Some could not.

Beginning in late October 2007 Denise Hunt, recruitment specialist, began to take principals, assistant principals and other staff to job fairs to recruit the most highly qualified people to work with the students of Culpeper County.

That work continued through 23 fairs and concluded the end of May with the Virginia Association of School Personnel Administrators expo in Fredericksburg. The Expo was a new fair this year and was extremely well-attended by teacher candidates from not only Virginia but also Pennsylvania, North Carolina, West Virginia and a number of other states.

CCPS was represented at fairs at Gettysburg, Penn State, West Virginia University, Radford/Virginia Tech, Marshall University and many other places. The effort to be where qualified graduates were took a huge commitment in time, energy, planning and budget.

Having materials updated yearly when the unknown suddenly became evident after-the-fact was also problematic this year. However, no effort is too great to provide the best possible teachers for Culpeper County’s students.

For the past three years, the human resources department has made a concerted effort to cut paper waste. Instead of taking lots of pamphlets, applications, reference forms and other paperwork, a CD was prepared with community and school information. Included was the Web site for CCPS’ online application.

For salaries the current range has been put on the CD with an explanation that it is the current salary scale.

This year the actual scale was decreased to comply with budget constraints, so when candidates were offered positions, they could not understand why the current salary scale was higher than the new one they were being offered.

Yearly, in early January, the Culpeper County Public Schools human resources department sends letters of intent to all staff in order to determine what possible vacancies they may have for the upcoming year.

With that information as a guide, preparation begins for staffing in the upcoming school year. No one could have predicted the rise in fuel and what it would do to that effort.

In order to attract new graduates to Culpeper and provide housing, Mrs. Hunt works with several rental agencies to get the best rental price possible. These graduates are young, eager and full of excitement as they begin their careers in education, hoping to make a difference in the life of a child. The least we can do is help make their transition less stressful.

As the needs for hookup fees and rental money are up-front costs, CCPS recognizes that new teachers may not have the funds to make the move, so the candidate has the option to get $1,200 at the end of August in the form of a no cost loan where $100 is taken from each of the next 12 checks. New teachers are also paid for induction days as a way to get some pay in August.

A total of 84 teachers have been hired. Four candidates reneged after accepting the job offer and a half-dozen declined offers.

We welcome the new staff to Culpeper County Public Schools and know that everyone will help to make the upcoming school year the best ever!

Starr Rowe is the director of human resources for Culpeper County Public Schools. E-mail