Qualified teachers have been pressed into service at Bowie Middle School and Burnet Elementary to fill open spots.

Many of those teachers are from the gifted and talented ranks and have been serving in those spots for years. Some were given little notice to move to Bowie and Burnet. Ector County ISD Superintendent Scott Muri stressed that moving these teachers is not something the district wanted to do, but something that was an imperative to serve the system as a whole.

Both campuses are in the Rapidly Improving School Effectiveness program, or RISE. RISE is being implemented because the schools are designated as F under state accountability ratings.

The program is based on Dallas ISD’s ACE, or Accelerating School Excellence, program. Because it has been successful, ACE was contracted out to other districts.

Funds tied to the program cover a longer school day, materials and supplies for additional activities, targeted tutoring and other activities. The grant also paid for a recruiting firm to find teachers. The name and cost of that recruiting firm were unavailable as of press time.

Part of RISE’s requirements are that the teachers meet certain criteria. In April, Bowie Principal Paul Fulce said he couldn’t have any first-year teachers. In the article, Fulce said he had to hire 60 teachers and the campus was supposed to have 80.

“I can’t have anyone who’s not certified. The idea is that with all this additional funding and the expectations we want to have the best of the best,” Fulce said in April.

Muri said in an Aug. 3 interview that ECISD has been monitoring its vacancies all summer.

“We started in early, end of April-early May, with hundreds of teacher vacancies across the system. Today is Aug. 3, and we have 95 vacancies in our system so we’ve done a really good job of reducing the number of vacancies that we have. But this year, middle school has been an area across our system that we’ve struggled to find middle school teachers,” Muri said.

“We must open every single school on the first day … (as) fully staffed as we can. We had a couple of our schools, one elementary and one middle, that were significantly understaffed and so that required us to move staff members to fill those vacancies at Burnet Elementary and Bowie Middle School,” Mari added.

The district looked at some of its schools that had all their vacancies filled and also at programs and tried to figure out how they could move teachers that were certified to the areas that they were needed at the middle and elementary school level that would have the least impact on students across the system, Muri said.

Bowie and Burnet had very specific certification needs.

“We looked across the system, identified teachers that had these certification areas and then we wanted to move … good teachers,” Muri said.

One of the teachers that moved was Jamie O’Connell, most recently at Gonzales Elementary School. She also is part of the district’s Techy Tribe.

She got there about two days before she attended training while other teachers had already been in it for about a week. O’Connell said it was a complete shock.

O’Connell got certified for middle school with the intention of eventually moving up to middle school. She has three children at three different campuses.

She has just completed year 12 of her teaching career. Other than raising some middle schoolers, she had no experience teaching at that level.

“My intention was to take that course, but when I wanted to. I love teaching and I’m really passionate about our district. I fully believe that I’m going to go where I’m called to go and I’m going to do what’s best for kids and so at this point my main goal was to make sure that my own children were settled and taken care of because I have three different kids on three different campuses now. Now that I’ve got that organized and in place, I’m actually super excited to be a part of this program,” O’Connell said.

She will be teaching seventh grade reading and writing at Bowie.

“That was the whole reason for me even taking that certification was each year that my own children complete, I see the work that they do and I see the challenges that they face and I think I can teach that. … I see the things that they overcome academically, emotionally and I just want to love on these students the way that I love on my own children. That really is my teaching philosophy anyway is just to treat my students the way that I treat my kids,” O’Connell said.

She said she thinks the RISE program will be successful.

“… It was actually really exciting to be a part of this training … because getting into the whole middle school setting, I thought I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m the new person on campus, but really all of us are the new people on campus because we’re all learning the new behavioral protocols and all these new policies that are in place. I think they’ve got some really great things happening here that are going to affect all the students, all the parents, everybody, for the better. So I think it’s going to be really good. It’s going to turn this campus around for the better,” O’Connell said.

Muri said moving the teachers will not decimate the gifted and talented program. He added that the ECISD board of trustees will vote on a gifted and talented plan at an upcoming board meeting.

“But we’ve made some very intentional improvements in that area — elementary, middle school and high school — to make sure that our gifted and talented kids (are) better served,” Muri said.

He said they discovered that gifted and talented students were being under-identified.

“… We should have more gifted students in our system than we currently do and so we’ve made some adjustments in how we identify gifted kids and then the way we serve them. … Especially when we get to the high school level, our SAT results, our ACT results, our success in Advanced Placement courses, we need to make sure that kids that, especially that gifted population, is better prepared — elementary, middle school and high school — so we’re improving, if you will, our programming for those kids.”

Asked what gifted means, Muri said gifted children have “some unique talents and abilities in academic areas.”

“… There’s a series of assessments that we use to identify giftedness in children and children that do have giftedness … need to be served differently. They need to have access to different types of resources. They learn differently and need different opportunities, much like students that are dyslexic, or students that are special ed … There are all types of learning differences that we see in our system and it’s up to us to make sure that we address all of those learning differences. Gifted children learn differently and so that’s our opportunity as a system to meet their uniqueness,” Muri said.

In addressing the short notice teachers felt they got, Muri said the urgency was there all year to find great teachers to go to those schools. He added that a recruiting firm was hired to fill teacher vacancies throughout the district, not just at Burnet and Bowie.

“… We’ve had significant urgency. This is not something that we wanted to do. This is something we have to do. We cannot allow any school in ECISD to open without an appropriate number of staff members to serve the students. And so this is, again, not something we want to do but we’re left with no option because our recruitment efforts … did not yield the kind of results that we needed,” he said.

Muri said he has never had to use a recruiting firm for teachers before.

“We’ve always marketed, so I’ve not been a part of systems that have hired marketing firms …” that promote why you should join a certain district, Muri said.

He said marketing has to be done so the district can tell its story.

“… Sometimes we need experts, if you will, to help us tell that story so that we can attract interest,” Muri added.

In addition to short notice, teachers felt forced to move and say they weren’t told of extra time they would have to put in. They also felt that they were being treated harshly for a problem they didn’t cause.

“We are a school system with 4,200 employees and we serve children and it is our responsibility, this in all of our contracts, that … we serve at the pleasure of the system. … Our responsibility is to go wherever we are needed, whether you’re a custodian, teacher, principal; whatever that role may happen to be. We work for ECISD. We don’t work for a specific school. The signature on our check is not the name of our school; it is Ector County Independent School District. So as a system, we have to place people where they are best suited and where the needs of the district happen to be. In this year, we had two very specific needs and we needed people to address those needs. And we didn’t move just anybody. We have to move good teachers in there and so if you’re an experienced teacher, that’s the kind of teacher that we need is somebody with experience. I don’t want to put a first-year teacher at a school that’s in crisis. That is not a place for a first-year teacher. A first-year teacher needs to be in a place that they can be mentored and have a healthy first year. A fragile school needs experienced teachers, so that’s who we selected.”

Certification was one of the factors used in selecting the teachers that were moved.

“… You had to be certified at the middle school level, so if the school needed the middle school math, we needed people with middle school certification. It wasn’t necessarily your teaching experience. It was much more about … your certification area and then your … years of experience from that perspective. But … I’ll remind folks it is not something we wanted to do. If we had wanted to do this and this was our intent, we would have done it in the spring. Our intent was to recruit and hire a group of people that could fill the vacancies that we have. … That didn’t happen. Again, today we still have 95 vacancies,” Muri said.

He added that the teacher shortage is statewide.

“… Our kids deserve great teachers in the classroom and we have to do everything we can as a system to ensure that every kid, when you’re on that first day, has a teacher. We’re still working for that …,” Muri added.

Burnet and Bowie, the schools that needed teachers the most, are both RISE campuses.

Muri said both campuses were trending in the wrong direction. They were both trending as if they were going to be F schools for a fourth year, or perhaps a fifth.

“We’re not going to allow that. I mean, we’re just not and so we must do, as a system, whatever it takes to stop a school from heading down that pathway. And so with these two schools the strategy that we used at Bowie and Burnett, we reconstituted them. We removed the staff. Staff could reapply. They had to meet a certain criteria. But bold action was required. We can’t just tinker around the edges and hope for the best. We had to take action because it’s unacceptable to allow those schools to continue to pursue the F and that’s what was happening,” Muri said.

If one school within a district makes a failing grade for five consecutive years, mandatory state sanctions are triggered which include the Texas Education Agency replacing the district’s locally elected school board with state appointees or closing the struggling school.

Muri said this is not just an idle threat. It happens and it is law.

“… The commissioner may not want to do that, but the law requires him to do that; at the end of five years it is a requirement. It’s not an option, so our responsibility as a school system is to make sure that no school in our system ever reaches that point. In fact, we shouldn’t have any F’s in ECISD. Our goal is to make sure that every school is successful, so that’s our direction. Let’s keep our schools in the A B and C range, rather than the D and F range. But in order to do that, it means we have to do things we’ve never done before,” Muri said.

He said the strategy used at the two schools had to be employed to “stop the bleed; those schools were bleeding failure and we had to flip them around.”

ECISD has 42 campuses. According to a graphic shown at Leadership University in July, there are five A rated schools, six B schools; 10 C rated schools; four D rated schools; and 16 F rated schools.

But Muri said the F rated schools come with a caveat.

“That’s as of 2019,” Muri said. He added that there were no ratings in 2020 or 2021, although students did take the STAAR this year. However, the state is still not implementing a full accountability system.

“We anticipate this year, ‘21-22 being a year, assuming COVID and everything subsides and we have a typical year, then we’ll see that accountability system return. … Our schools have not had an opportunity to escape, because it hasn’t existed.”

Asked if he regretted implementing RISE, Muri said what he didn’t regret is taking bold action.

“I applaud our trustees for supporting bold action. And that’s their directive to me is … we have to address the F schools, the D schools that we have and change has to happen,” Muri said.

“Was that the right strategy? I think at the time we felt that that is the right strategy. Will we get the right results? We’re feeling pretty good. Again, we’ve got a good team and both of those schools have two great leaders in place. Great people are working in those schools from a teacher perspective and support staff, so I feel confident we’re going to get the right results,” he added.

“I think it is challenging in an environment where you have a shortage of teachers already to reconstitute … But we were confident in our ability to attract (people) to those schools. The teachers are making more money in those environments. There was a pretty high threshold of talent that was required, and to be a part of a team in a turnaround environment that excites a lot of educators, but we just couldn’t attract enough people to take on that role; just couldn’t do it,” he said.

Some people are not moving for new opportunities because of COVID.

“… Maybe next year … if COVID is a non-existent thing, then we might be able to attract more people to our area because they would be more willing to move. But I still think that played a little bit of a role … In fact, we did have quite a bit of interest from teachers, if they could teach virtually” from where they were, Muri said.

He added that ECISD wanted teachers in the classrooms with students.

“… It’s difficult in a virtual environment for some teachers to develop that relationship. And our middle school kids need that,” Muri said.