Texas Districts Courting Out-of-State Teachers Facing Potential Layoffs

A $4.8 billion shortfall in state education funding is likely to cause some California districts to lay off teachers. Houston, Aldine, and Fort Worth are among the districts that hope to attract some of those teachers to fill teaching vacancies, particularly in hard-to-staff areas such as bilingual education, science, and math.

Texas’ colleges and universities produce only about half of the 30,000 to 45,000 new teachers Texas districts need to hire each year. As Texas’ population continues to grow, recruiters have to scour the U.S. and even foreign countries to find the teachers they need. So they stay on top of layoff news even late in the hiring season, hoping to snatch up some recently pink-slipped teachers.

When Aldine ISD heard that Puerto Rico was laying teachers off last year, recruiters made an unscheduled trip to the island and returned to Texas with 10 new teachers. Aldine hopes it will attract some California educators by placing employment ads in newspapers. If the district gets a big enough response from math and science teachers, an Aldine recruiter will get on a plane to California in hopes of filling some of this year’s 600 teaching vacancies.

Fort Worth ISD was the beneficiary of a happy coincidence. The district put up two billboards to recruit San Diego teachers in March as part of an effort to attract educators from districts with similar demographics. The layoffs have netted Fort Worth 21 applications and a couple of dozen calls from California teachers. Fort Worth recruiters will travel to California in a couple of weeks to conduct interviews.

Houston ISD won’t be far behind. The district has placed employment ads and recruiters will head to California in May. Houston ISD has 1,200 teaching positions to fill.

Recruiters will sell the Californians on Texas by telling them that a teacher’s salary goes further here, with lower housing prices and living expenses.

They’ll have some competition when they make their pitch. Other states are also aggressively recruiting California teachers. Frank Wells, a spokesman for the California Teachers Association, said that job instability there has hurt teacher morale and that the ramifications of losing teachers to other states as shortages loom and baby boom teachers prepare to retire could be devastating.

—“Texas looking west for teachers,” by Jennifer Radcliffe, Houston Chronicle, April 24, 2008.