Job fair aimed at recruiting more teachers across Central Coast
As a new school year approaches, many school districts on the Central Coast are looking for new teachers. On Tuesday, a job fair was held in Salinas in hopes of filling some open slots.
School districts in Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz counties were recruiting at the Monterey County Office of Education. Science, math and speech therapy are some of the most crticial areas that need to be filled.
Salinas Union High School District has a couple dozen teacher positions to fill.
“We have teachers who are aging out. We have other teachers that start and work with us for a while and then decide to move elsewhere,” said Randy Bangs, assisant superintendent for Human Resources for the Salinas Union High School District.
He said there have also been teachers who had to be let go or chose not to come back because they weren’t feeling successful in the classrooms.
Monterey County Superintendent Dr. Nancy Kotowski said school districts are now doing performance-based budgeting, using what’s called a “local control accountability plan.”
“With that, districts are making local decisions about what the real needs are for their community and their children and so the positions that are being filled are also to fill the kinds of needs the school districts are identifying,” she said.
Proposition 30 fills holes in education funding. Now the money passed in 2012 had trickled down to the local districts. As a result, districts have been able to reduce class sizes. That, of course, means the need to hire more teachers.
