GFPS moves intervention teachers back to classrooms involuntarily due to teacher shortage for upcoming year
Facing a significant teacher shortage, Great Falls Public Schools is involuntarily transferring intervention teachers to elementary classrooms.
Several former teachers, friends and family of those teachers reached out to The Electric on their behalf as they’re concerned for their jobs during contract negotiations.
Those individuals had concerns and frustrations about the move.
The Electric took that information to talk to GFPS officials about the action.
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GFPS is currently 15-17 positions short for elementary teachers for the upcoming school year, Jackie Mainwaring, assistant superintendent, told The Electric.
The district uses involuntary transfers every year to fill necessary positions that it can’t otherwise fill for a variety of reasons, she said, but this move is unique in that they’re moving a group of teachers to the classroom to fill those vacancies.
“It’s a pretty complicated situation,” she said.
An instructional coach is also being moved back to the classroom.
Intervention teachers help students who are struggling in the classroom to catch up to their grade level and prevent them from falling further behind, among other duties.
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There’s two significant factors the district is looking at in this case, she said.
Accreditation standards require a certain number of classroom teachers and the federal Title 1 funding plays into the intervention positions.
Title 1 is federal funding that provides additional academic support and learning opportunities to schools in which at least 40 percent of students come from low-income families, according to GFPS.
The funds are used in schools with the highest percentages of students from low-income families and the allocations are determined by a federal per-pupil formula, according to Mainwaring and Lance Boyd, assistant superintendent.
This school year, the district received $3,462,258 in Title 1 funding.
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Mainwaring said that to try meeting both of those requirements, the district is working to maintain six to eight intervention positions at the schools that rank highest in that Title 1 hierarchy of need.
Every school has needs, but they’re basing the decision on those federal implications, she said, “so we’d like to maintain intervention at our highest need schools” and try to mitigate the loss of Title 1 funding.
Boyd said the move could affect their Title 1 allocation since the district has to demonstrate the maintenance of equity for those low-income students since the district has had an intervention program for years.
“We’re gonna have to work really hard with the state to determine what other things are allowable when working with less” staff, Boyd said of the move.
He said Title 1 funding wouldn’t be reduced based on the number of intervention teachers but will be related to whether the district can maintain adequate programming.
“We are working on some other intervention strategies or programs to try to mitigate” the change, Mainwaring said, with a program they’ve been piloting in four schools.
They’re going to roll out the program, Lexia, to all elementary and middle schools next year.
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The district was testing the program specifically in schools where they weren’t able to hire an intervention teacher and said they were seeing good results.
Boyd said the Lexia expansion has a cost, but since some other programs have expired, the district is reallocating those dollars to Lexia, which will be funded in part by Title 1 and also general fund dollars.
Mainwaring said she’s been with GFPS for 25 years and the district has had an intervention program that entire time.
Some school districts don’t have intervention teachers and Mainwaring said GFPS has held on to the program for a long time, growing to have teachers in each building.
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She said they’re watching the federal budget process closely as the Trump administration budget includes significant reductions to Title 1.
All of the educators The Electric spoke to, including GFPS officials, said they are concerned about reducing intervention teachers and the potential impact to student learning as the district has a number of students who already aren’t performing at grade level.
Those who spoke to The Electric on behalf of the intervention teachers said they’re concerned that the move puts more burden on classroom teachers and risks more students falling behind.
“At the end of the day, we’re trying to make the best decisions we can with the information we have to follow all the guidelines we need to follow and still take care of our people,” Mainwaring said. “We wish we weren’t in this situation and this position, but here we are.”
Mainwaring said that if the district gets more applications and are able to hire more elementary classroom teachers, the district will move the intervention teachers back to their intervention positions through a structured process.
It’s a “hopeful thing, but we’re not sure we’ll have that many applicants,” she said.
GFPS officials met with the intervention teachers on May 28 to talk about the process and get an idea of their preferences for buildings or grade levels to teach.
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Mainwaring said they’re trying to do their best to put those teachers in a spot they’ll like and be successful.
She said they’ll let those teachers know where they’ll be assigned before the end of the current school year.
“These are hard decisions, we know that intervention is important, but we’re trying to balance those requirements that we have,” Mainwaring said.
Hiring has been a struggle for the last few years and post-COVID, she said fewer teachers are coming out of university programs.
GFPS has particularly struggled to recruit and retain elementary and special education teachers.
Several elementary counselors retired recently and some of those positions were filled by classroom teachers, she said.
It’s a teacher shortage, she said, that’s being seen across Montana and the U.S.
According to a report from the Montana Office of Public Instruction to the 2023 Legislature, nationally, “it appears that prior to the pandemic, the teacher turnover rate consistently ranged from 12 to 14 percent. Montana’s teacher turnover rate was consistent with these numbers. However, post-pandemic turnover rates seem to have increased by a minimum of two percentage points. In simple terms, with roughly 8,000 teachers in Montana, the state needed to fill
around 1,000 teaching positions heading into the 2023-24 school year, as evident from the 1,039 open positions listed. However, filling 1,039 educator openings is only part of the problem. According to the most recent data from the Montana University System, there were only 383 education graduates in 2022, and in 2021, 86 percent of education graduates either left the state or started their careers in another field.”
Montana university programs graduated 649 teachers in 2021, up from 557 in 2020 and 614 in 2019, according to the same report.
GFPS opened its CORE School this year, designed to grow teachers.
It’s a three year program with 12 currently in the cohort.
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The district partnered with the University of Montana Western, which received a grant toward the program to cover tuition for the participants. Those students are required to stay and teach within Montana for five years in exchange for free tuition, but don’t have to stay in Great Falls.
Mainwaring said they’re hopeful many of those students will stay and become teachers in GFPS.
The district can have 10-14 in each cohort, so eventually, they’ll have a group of students coming out ready to teach every year, she said.
After the May 28 meeting with the intervention teachers about the situation, Mainwaring said she hoped those teachers felt a little better.
“We’re wanting to do right by them in a tough situation,” she said.
The teachers were notified of the move on May 21, well past the deadlines in their contracts to notify the district of resignation or retirement, as well as past the inter district transfer process.
Teachers have to notify the district by March 1 to resign or retire and still receive the payout of unused personal and sick days, which may roll into their retirement final payment, according to Tom Cubbage, president of the local teacher union.
Families and friends of the intervention teachers told The Electric that many felt blindsided by the move and would have looked for a different position within the district if they knew the move was coming.
If a teacher wanted to quit because of the involuntary transfer, they risk losing their unused personal and sick days since it’s past the deadline, according to multiple local educators who spoke to The Electric about the move.
Cubbage said the union was notified of the change the day before the intervention teachers were notified.
He said the union discussed the process and negotiated some aspects of the move.
Mainwaring said that oftentimes the involuntary transfer process is done in the late summer or beginning of the school year, but they wanted to make this move as soon as they realized they had so many elementary teacher openings.
It’s “pretty clear we aren’t going to have that many applications over the summer,” Mainwaring said. “So doing it sooner rather than later seemed like the right thing to do.”
She said that a month ago, they didn’t have so many openings, but with some retirements, internal transfers and lack of applications, the situation shifted.
“A month ago we thought we were sitting pretty good actually,” she said.
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