L.A. Unified Hunting for Teachers

The Los Angeles Unified School District on Thursday kicked off what officials called its most aggressive teacher recruitment campaign ever.

The district has launched a radio campaign on two local FM stations and will splash advertisements across Southland billboards, hoping to reel in enough would-be teachers to fill its projected 4,000 vacancies for next school year.

“We need to spread the net wide. We need to be creative,” said interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines. “When I first went into teaching, you had to make a commitment for life. Now, it doesn’t have to be a commitment for life. I want mid-career people to come [teach]--from business, from science, from industry.”

The demand for new teachers is driven by booming enrollment and class-size reductions.

“Our need for teachers is urgent,” said district spokeswoman Hilda Ramirez. “At the beginning of this year, we gained 12,000 students, and all the projections tell us that that rate of growth is going to continue.”

To keep pace, the district has hired about 4,000 teachers in each of the past three years. Half were hired on emergency permits.

That has created a high premium for those teachers with the most experience, so much so that the district is offering National Board-certified teachers a bonus of 15% of their current salaries. The district also recognizes the number of years veteran teachers have spent in the classroom and pays them accordingly.

But Day Higuchi, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, said that although the district offers good pay to teachers with emergency permits, those with credentials continue to get short shrift.

“If they want to get credentialed teachers, that’s going to be tough because [pay is] in the bottom third in the county,” said Higuchi, who will soon enter contract negotiations with the district. “I wish them luck, but it would really help if there was higher pay for teachers after they got their credentials.”

At a Thursday morning news conference announcing the campaign, Cortines made his best sales pitch to a sixth-grade class at Gompers Middle School in South Los Angeles--and more important, to the surrounding TV cameras. During a question-and-answer session, one sixth-grader asked Cortines if he was “ready to be a teacher” when he first started out. Cortines acknowledged he was not, as did the two other teachers in the room.

“You can do all the things that you’re supposed to,” said Genevieve DeBose, a first-year sixth-grade teacher at Gompers, “but you’re never really prepared to be a teacher until you step into the classroom.”

Cortines emphasized that although the challenge can be daunting, teachers don’t go it alone. The district is designed, he said, to provide a support network of teachers and administrators.

“When you come to work with us, you will know that you’re not going to be alone,” Cortines said. It’s important, he said, that new teachers “can go to the principal and say, ‘I have a problem,’ and not feel threatened, not feel like they’re going to get rid of you.”

Although the recruitment effort beckons prospective teachers to “join the new LAUSD,” Cortines emphasized that overhauling the system is a bottom-up process.

“You can reorganize this district, you can have more money, but the way this district is going to improve is to have the best teachers,” Cortines said. “All the rhetoric aside, what goes on in the classroom is what makes the real difference.”

Interested teachers can get information from the Web site https://www.TeachinLA.com.