Board members call for more black teachers at schools

Schools say they pursue minorities, but there is a lack of candidates

School Board members John Smith and Ellis Alexander are concerned that there is a lack of minority representation in the school district.

While about 36 percent of students in local schools are African-American, only 12 percent of teachers are.

When it comes to administration, the school district is a lot more balanced.

Minorities make up 29 percent of area principals and 33 percent of local administrative assistants.

Out of the 19 schools in the district, 12 schools have 10 percent or less African-American teachers. Mimosa Park Elementary and the Satellite Center do not have any black teachers.

“There’s quite a bit to be desired in respect to this issue,” Smith said.

Smith and Alexander urged the administration to make more of an effort to hire minority teachers, but others on the board said that a lack of candidates makes it difficult to hire more African-Americans.

“What type of pool do we have to choose from?” Board member Stephen Crovetto said. “Sometimes these goals are unachievable…my goal is to hire the best.”

The school administration already has many steps in place to try to recruit minority employees. Each year, recruitment teams participate in job fairs at historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, and place advertisements in magazines like “Teachers of Color” and HBCU on-line and on-campus resources.

But Smith thinks more could be done.

“We spend a lot of money recruiting people, and when they’re not hired, it raises a lot of questions,” Smith said. “When I look at the action steps…I see the same things that we said we were going to do five years ago, 10 years ago.

“In order to address this issue…it is obvious to me that something different has to happen and it’s not enough to just say we don’t have a pool.”

In response to these concerns, the administration came up with new action steps to incorporate into their minority recruitment plans.

In addition to what is already done, Human Resources Executive Director Paul Gibson said that the district will begin pushing minority para-educators to become certified teachers and minority teachers to pursue administrative degrees.

“We’re going to go out and talk to teachers and talk to para-educators to kind of push them in that direction,” Gibson said. “We can help them by setting them up with meetings at different colleges we have relationships with.”

Board member Sonny Savoie said that the district should start at a lower level by encouraging students to go into the teaching profession.

When it comes to Mimosa Park and the Satellite Center, Gibson said that the schools both have no minority educators because of a low turnover rate.

“We have a lot of teachers that have been at Mimosa for quite some time and basically there’s not a lot of turnover there. When you do have some turnover…you can have people who are already in the district who want to transfer because they live closer to that school,” Gibson said. “It’s the same thing with the Satellite Center.”

But Alexander was concerned that the amount of candidates is not the only problem.

He said that the hiring process is flawed because school principals have the final say in who is offered a job.

Currently, a teacher is selected for the interview process by the human resources department. They then complete an interview with the department, with the prospective school’s principal, and do a lesson demonstration and a writing sample.

“It’s a team effort…but if there are three or four candidates who pass the interview process, the principal has the last word,” Gibson said.

Alexander said that the personnel department should do all hiring and then send the new teachers out to the schools where they are needed. If the administration is choosing the “best and the brightest” new teachers, then he said the schools should not have a problem.

But Superintendent Rodney Lafon and Smith disagreed, citing that the principals know the schools best and know what is best for their students.

“The top-down model of hiring personnel does not work,” Smith said, but added that he thinks the human resources department should become more involved in the hiring process.

Smith also worried that the numbers indicate an uneven playing field that could discourage possible minority teachers from applying at all.