Harford County Public Schools presented an update of the school system’s strategic initiative for recruitment and retention goals at Monday evening’s Board of Education meeting.
The Talent Pathways Project is the school system’s effort to address teacher recruitment challenges and increase diversity. While the goal is to build strong talent pathways for all positions, the focus is on future hiring needs and creating innovative ways to find and develop future educators.
The program also provides support for current teachers, school leaders, support staff, paraprofessionals and adults that work with students to help them succeed.
“We have been engaged in this work for a little over a year, and I’ve identified a few reasons why this work is important,” said county public schools Talent Pathways Manager Vicki Jones.
In 2018, for the first time, 54% of adults said they would not want a child of theirs to become a public school teacher, according to the PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, which Jones provided. In 2022, the professional teachers support organization’s poll found that percentage had risen to a record high of 62%.
Over the past five years, less than 10% of Harford County public school teachers have been people of color, while almost 40% of students are, according to Jones.
“As we know, these trends are not limited to Harford County,” Jones said. “I do want to say that many other districts nationwide are struggling to bring staff on and diversify their pool. So the district solution is to grow our own.”
Three pathways
There are three pathways in the school system’s initiative: Pathways for Students, Pathways for Career Changers and Pathways for Current Employees.
“These pathways are both vital to recruitment, and retaining and growing our existing staff,” said Research Triangle Institute’s Meghan Doyle, who works with Research Triangle Institute and is a former schools superintendent in Craven County, North Carolina. RTI is a nonprofit research institute dedicated to improving district-based education support services.
Pathways for Students offers county students multiple learning opportunities to explore education as a profession in hopes they either will consider teaching or working in the county school system as a career. For college students, it increases the number of hands-on, classroom-based learning opportunities across the district, with a focus on increasing the pool of diverse educator candidates.
High school students interested in becoming teachers can join the Teachers Academy of Maryland. Students must complete four courses including human growth and development through adolescence, teaching as a profession, foundations of curriculum and instruction, and a teacher academy internship, to be eligible for college credits.
Students who don’t attend the academy can take part in teacher panels, higher education visits, and parent nights featuring teachers. They also could have a formal apprenticeship during their junior and senior years, including becoming an elementary classroom assistant for credit.
Pathways for Career Changers supports multiple flexible pathways into Harford County Public Schools classrooms and other positions, with a focus on recruiting and supporting new and conditional teachers and other mid-career professionals.
Pathways for Current Employees provides staff throughout the district multiple pathways and support for career advancement, such as paraprofessionals moving into teaching positions and teachers advancing into leadership.
“As we think about this work in particular, we think about who are our current citizens of Harford County and how we are going to grow their children,” Doyle said. “Talent Pathways is really connecting all of the different processes that are operating in multiple departments in HCPS to help us grow a quality talent pipeline.”
Key Initiatives
To identify employment needs, Harford County Public Schools launched a needs assessment that included feedback from teachers, paraeducators, administrators, families, students and anonymous surveys, according to Sabrina Solares-Hand, a senior education consultant with ILO Group, an education strategy and policy firm.
“Ultimately the goal was to capture the current state of Talent Pathways to identify growth opportunities, and to illustrate the existing Talent Pathways strategies that have been deployed by HCPS thus far,” Doyle said.
With the help of the needs assessment, a cross-functional implementation cohort is formed using the data collected through the assessment to provide an outside perspective, according to Harford County Public Schools Supervisor of Social Sciences Erin Lange.
“We take this rich data that we have to turn it into meaningful action items,” Lange said.
A big HCPS Talent Pathways initiative is The Model School Program and Roye-Williams Pilot, a new school building which will house the Harford Academy and a new elementary school.
Harford County Public Schools plans to house a model school, a multi-level pre-service program that will be a part of the pathways work, to create an environment that is both a model learning environment for students and a model learning environment for student teachers, according to the presentation.
Pre-service training from college faculty and mentors will happen regularly within the actual school building such that student teachers can quickly apply what they learn in the classroom. Additionally, the school system will collaborate with partner colleges and universities to include regular, hands-on experience for teaching majors in their sophomore and junior year of college, according to the presentation.
The Roye-Wiliams Pilot will includesome elements from the model school program with a focus on relationships and trust-building; along with other issues that challenge student teachers, such classroom management, classroom norms, procedures and routines, and parent communication.
The school building will be opened in the 2027-28 school year.
The next school board meeting is 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 6.
