Governor Bush is a recruiter! We need 32,000 teachers across our great state! This is what I would do.

32,000 teachers is a lot of teachers to recruit and hire in Florida. It is nice to see Governor Bush taking some initiate to help this issue by offering a plan that offers relocation reimbursements and some incentives like a laptop computer. Please reference this article. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/orl-gov2306jan23,0,4486355.story?coll=orl-home-headlines

I think we have some other opportunities to recruit the best and the brightest, that quite frankly, wouldn’t cost the state a ton of money. Experienced teachers can be recruited! If you are a teacher either in Florida or from another state, where do you find exciting information about openings and career path? Where is this information? Can you find it easily? Even the states website used to recruit teachers, http://www.teachinflorida.com/, has old postings and not much content. If you perform a teacher search in Orange County, your results indicate one teaching job when we know there are many! Recruiting is an everyday event. It takes a great word of mouth referral network combined with the power of internet recruiting to help shorten the hiring cycle. Besides career fairs and college recruiting, what else can be done to find the next 32,000 teachers? Here is what I would do:

1) Have each county professionally write great job descriptions about the “specifics” of the jobs they have available. This job description should paint the picture for what a teacher could expect if they worked for a school in that county. I would write a different description for a math teacher as well as one for a history teacher. It should include all the benefits, information about the county, the school system, awards, recognitions and career path. The states job descriptions for teachers are quite frankly… horrible.

2) Cross post teacher jobs to National and Locally recognized career websites. Get the word out!

3) Form some partnerships with companies like Disney and St. Joes to help cross promote teacher needs in Florida. For example, why can’t the State of Florida partner with Disney to put teacher jobs and recruiting information on the back of all park tickets?

4) Starting in 9th grade through 12th, have a career fair twice a year that focuses on the teaching profession and the process of becoming one in the future. Make it fun and give more students access early to this treasured profession!

5) Each school system should have a separate website designed and optimized for the recruiting of teachers. It should be the complete career center that not only posts jobs and collects resumes, but also can update potential teachers on a regular basis.

I will have more ideas in my next posting. In the meantime, if you know any teachers, please tell them we need them.