County Launches Recruitment Drive : Teachers’ Assignment: Pitch for Profession

With San Diego County schools needing 10,000 to 11,000 new teachers by the turn of the century, the county Office of Education on Tuesday unveiled a recruitment plan using top teachers to carry the message to high school and college classrooms.

The campaign will attempt to polish the image of the teaching profession, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s was tarnished by low salaries, little respect and a tight job market, officials said. County Supt. of Schools Gerald Rosander, who created the program, described it as the only campaign of its kind in the country.

It will make use of the profession’s best: 75 teachers selected by their principals and superintendents.

“It’s more important for that (teacher) to tell it than to have a dean or a businessman who has never been in the classroom” describe teaching, said Carol Pugmire, director of personnel and communications for the county education office. “I want it to come from the guts. I want it to come from the heart.”

Daunting demographic predictions make teacher recruitment an urgent matter for school leaders. Deputy Supt. Donald Rucker said that the county will need 162 new schools to house 150,000 additional students by the year 2000. If all the needed schools are built, they will cost more than $1 billion, he said.

About 6,000 new teachers will be required to handle the expansion, and an additional 4,000 to 5,000 must be recruited to replace retirees, officials estimate. But those figures are small in comparison to the 85,000 teachers needed statewide by 1990 and the 1.5 million required nationwide by 1993.

The challenge, Pugmire said, is to meet the demand in a systematic way, so that school districts do not find themselves competing for the same teachers or suffering shortages of specialists who are available in other parts of the county or state.

The educational missionaries met Tuesday at San Diego State University for a seminar on how to appeal to the high school, community college, college and university students they will be approaching beginning next week.

Pugmire described them as “a Noah’s Ark” of the county’s best and brightest--classroom teachers, special education teachers, guidance counselors, “mentor teachers” who help train their peers, and six college professors.

Acknowledging that teaching still burns out even some of its most dedicated members, some teachers promised to tell students of rising pay and status in a nation that is giving close scrutiny to their working conditions. Others said they would stress the satisfaction of the job.

“I’m going to tell them that we need good, quality educators. We need people who have that calling,” said Vivian Tuck, a physical education teacher in the Sweetwater Union High School district.

“There’s more to life than money. There’s more to life than having a large house and a fancy car. There’s a satisfaction in life that you have done something for somebody else.”

But L.B. Rickards, who has been a physical education teacher at Lakeside Middle School for 14 years, said that “kids are not going to buy that the joy of teaching outweighs the money.”

Rickards intends to emphasize a salary scale that will give him a $40,000 annual income within a few years and the fact that teaching becomes easier the longer a teacher stays in the profession.

Many said they feel a responsibility to improve the public image of their profession by recruiting top students who will become dynamic teachers.

“It really is important to encourage the higher achievers to go into education, so education doesn’t just receive the people who aren’t selected to go into other areas,” said Mary Lewis, a kindergarten teacher in Julian. “For too long, teachers have been de-professionalized. We are professionals, and we should be regarded as professionals.”