In the Pool at the Beach

 

A good place to catch people’s attention is at the beach. No, I don’t mean with a daring swimsuit, although that’s certainly a possibility. No, I’m talking about ocean front advertising. Like this, from a piece by WMAR2News:

Photo credit: Vicky Cutroneo, Howard County Board of Education (shared on Facebook)

That’s right. Several area schools systems are advertising for teachers at the beach this summer.

Maryland school districts promoting job openings with seaside ads, Rushaad Hayward, WMAR2News

My gut response to this was somewhat less than charitable. It went something like this:

Sure, go looking for teachers at the beach now, because they’ll never be able to afford a beach vacation once they’re teachers.

Another shoot straight from the hip response on Twitter took a different view:

What if, instead of advertising on a boat, we spent that money on improving working conditions?

Quips like these roll easily off the tongue and usually contain at least a grain of truth, if not a whole lot more. I have to admit they do nothing to recruit and hire teachers, however.

The teacher shortage is not merely a local problem. The reasons that teachers are leaving the profession are many. I’ve written about them frequently in this space. And the reasons that young people are not choosing education as their field of study and their life’s work are pretty much the same. They see how teachers are treated. They see how much they work, how little they earn, how much abuse they take from politicians. (And others.)

No matter how much one loves teaching, it's a time where it is easy to be jaded and disheartened. Every time a particular news article goes by in my Facebook feed, I wince. It's the one where a young applicant at a recruitment fair says:

“I’m just excited for a new adventure, to give back to my community,” she said at Thursday’s event at Loch Raven High School.

I wince because 1) I have been that person and because 2) I know how difficult that road will be. I almost wonder if I would wish it on anyone.

In spite of all this, school systems are tasked with hiring teachers. They have a mission to fulfill. They are bound by law to provide free, K-12 education. Someone, somewhere decided that advertising at the beach might be a good idea. This could be the result of creativity or desperation. I don’t know. It may result in a surge of qualified applicants. I don’t know that, either.

Something I’m curious about. What kind of applicant pool will one reach at the beach? Will it be racially, ethnically, economically diverse? What kinds of people are automatically filtered out of the equation because they won’t be there? “Oh, everyone around here goes to the beach!” you might say. No, they don’t. 

And are those potential applicants, the ones who aren’t there, ones our students deserve to learn from? Need to learn from? We desperately need a more diverse work force in the Howard County Schools. I wonder if we’ll find them at the beach.

Maybe. 

Is there a better place for an ad like this?

The first of the two hiring fairs is today, from ten am to three pm, at Wilde Lake Middle School.