BY TIMOTHY LAROCHE
[email protected]
CLAREMONT — As the end of the school year draws closer, staff changes in the Claremont School District are picking up, administrators say.
Already this year, district administrators said they have received notice of close to 70 staff changes. Staff changes are not necessarily the result of staff leaving, Assistant Superintendent Cory LeClair said, but can also represent movements of teachers between grade levels.
In less than a month, the Claremont School Board has accepted the resignations of two high-ranking staff members, with another resignation forthcoming. Most recently, Claremont Middle School Principal Pauline Fitzgerald announced this week that she has accepted a position as principal of Rundlett Middle School in Concord next year.
Her announcement follows the resignations of Special Education Director Chris Beeso and Curriculum Coordinator Christine Downing. Both resignations are effective June 30.
“I can tell you, from my experience, mobility in public schools is not uncommon,” Superintendent Middleton McGoodwin said.
In advance of the administrators leaving, McGoodwin said on Wednesday that he has begun forming search committees for a new principal and special education director.
Like the recently concluded search process for a new Sugar River Valley Regional Technical Center director, McGoodwin said that parents and community stakeholders will be invited to provide input on the process.
“When I spoke to a superintendent from a nearby district, he said ‘thank you for training our teachers,’” McGoodwin said of staff turnover.
By the end of the year, administrators say they expect to see an estimated 120 staff changes, pinning projections as an uptick from last year’s estimated 100 staff changes. In total, LeClair estimated that the district’s turnover rate is close to 25 percent.
“I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing but our number [of staff turnovers] is closer to 25 percent,” Leclair said.
While LeClair said that the district has not consistently undertaken exit interviews to find the cause of the leavings, the resignations follow the passage of a budget that includes several staffing cuts.
Following the board’s decision to move forward with a then-proposed budget including teacher layoffs, Superintendent Middleton McGoodwin noted that his office had received an uptick in requests for letters of reference, pointing the possibility of increased staff changes.
“We go into negotiations with the teachers union and they say, ‘people are leaving because we’re not paying enough,’” Chair Frank Sprague said. “We don’t know that, because we are not asking them… If the teachers union comes back and says we’re not paying enough to support them and we don’t have that data, we’re not going into that discussion with specificity.”
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