Armed with more than 400 new teachers and a pool of 500 substitutes, Ector County ISD is raring to go for this school year.
Superintendent Scott Muri said teachers from 25 countries are represented in classrooms across the district. He added that there is a member of the Human Capital Department who oversees all of the recruiting, retention and support of those individuals.
Muri said there are companies around the world that help identify teachers for districts. He added that there are teachers in the United States that teach abroad.
“We partner with several of these companies that recruit these teachers. These are teachers that are certified in their own countries. They have to go through a process in order to receive a visa, a work permit in our country. It’s a journey for those folks, and then once they’re in the United States, there are some additional requirements that teachers have to go through to continue teaching in this country year after year,” Muri said.
ECISD has about 2,000 teachers. Muri added there are almost 500 substitute teachers in the substitute pool.
“We haven’t seen that number of substitute teachers in many years, but this year we have a healthy number of substitutes, so when our teachers are sick, or we need to provide coverage … we’re able to that this year. … Those that are interested in substitute teachers have really risen to the occasion,” Muri said.
He added that the district has made a “significant investment in our human capital strategy over the last three years.”
“We’ve increased teacher compensation. We provide some incentives for teachers to earn more money. We’re developing the professionalism of teachers in our own organization through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, building the quality and caliber of teachers that we have, providing leadership opportunities for teachers through Opportunity Culture. There are plenty of strategies and tactics that we’ve been able to leverage over the past three years … so, again, kudos to our board of trustees for supporting that work; our Human Capital team for thinking creatively and innovatively to address those needs and then specifically hiring and retaining really great teachers …,” Muri said.
Safety and security are also top of mind. At the Aug. 9 board workshop, a comprehensive review of the safety process and procedures in place in ECISD was provided. Muri said some of the things that are being done to keep students and staff members safe was also shared.
“We’ve added a couple of new pieces to our existing safety protocols. We have finished an audit of all of our exterior doors, so our police department has checked every single exterior door on every building in ECISD to ensure that they are fully operational and any that we found to be defective our maintenance team has addressed those concerns,” Muri said.
“In addition, our school administrators have conducted more of an safety audit to make sure that the processes, systems and components of safety that we have in place are operational, and again, any defective parts of that need to be replaced are reported so we can take care of it,” he added.
ECISD police will start weekly safety checks this year at every single campus and report that to the school administration and central office “so we can make sure our schools are as safe as possible and those processes and systems we put in place centrally are utilized at the campus level,” Muri said.
“We also started locking every door in the internal part of our schools, so every teacher this year will maintain a locked door for their students. We’ll also be checking those on a weekly basis. It will be a little more difficult for folks walking around our campus to access our buildings and our classrooms … We want to make sure that our students and staff members are safe,” he said.
Every classroom door will remain locked this year, which is a new feature. They will open as students change classes, Muri said.
He added that he appreciates the cooperation of parens and community members and acknowledged that these measures can be uncomfortable sometimes.
“… But our purpose is to make sure that students and staff members remain safe at all times while they’re on a school campus,” Muri said.
Alarm systems are in every district building.
“We have officers on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Those alarms are constantly monitored by our police officers should any of those alarms trip and sometimes they do we dispatch one of those officers to investigate the situation at the school,” Muri said.
ECISD has more than 1,500 security cameras that allow them to monitor any visitor or anyone that enters a campus after hours or on weekends.
“We haven’t hired any new officers this year. We’ve done a little bit of reorganizing of our police officers to be more effective and efficient with the way they are utilized,” Muri said. “But at this point, we have not hired any new officers. It is something that we’re exploring to make sure that we have the right amount of officers to cover the students that we serve in the system.”
The projected number of students this year is 33,500, including students at the UTPB STEM Academy and Ector Middle School.
“The official count happens in October. … We will gain kids every single day over the next month until about the middle of September and then we flatline the rest of the year,”
Asked how they are going to keep the successful programs funded by ESSER going after the funding ends in two years, Muri said they will be in advocacy mode.
“We know that some of this work is highly effective. We’ve seen the results and we will be working with our state legislature in the upcoming legislative session to provide for some of the work that we’re doing so that not only ECISD but every school district in Texas can take advantage of some of these opportunities,” Muri said. “We’ll be working with a variety of strategies to help folks understand the importance of funding work that actually produces results.”
Asked if he thinks there are enough lawmakers to get on board with helping to get state funding for their districts, Muri said there are a lot of conversations around the teacher shortage in Texas right now.
“We had a teacher shortage in ECISD for many years, but we have been able to invest in some strategies” to help attract, retain, grow, develop and retain teachers.
“… Our state legislature will be very interested some of the strategies that we’re using within our own organization, so our opportunity is to share those with a legislature that is right now looking for solutions to address the shortage issue in Texas. I think that we have found some potential solutions that are not only good for us, but good for some other districts in Texas as well. Our opportunity is to educate and inform our legislature, so they can make some really smart choices as it relates to teachers in the state of Texas,” Muri said.
