Teachers scramble to become qualified

Total of 56.5 educators in county schools could be replaced

The schools are engaged in improvement plans that require all teachers of core academic subjects to be in the ‘‘highly qualified” category. Principals and county schools officials said their approach is to try raising the qualifications of current teachers or reassigning them before seeking replacements.

Eleven of Ernest Everett Just Elementary teachers in core academic subjects are considered to be under qualified as are 8.5 teachers at Largo High School.

Core academic subjects include math, science, language arts, English, social studies and special education.

Carlton Carter, the principal at Ernest Everett Just Middle, said he believed ‘‘it will be a 180-degree turnaround once we get these highly qualified teachers in here.”

‘‘It is the most determining factor that would cause the greatest impact in the school’s turnaround,” he said.

Minimum qualifications for a teacher to become ‘‘highly qualified” include having a bachelor’s degree and a Standard Professional Certificate, Advanced Professional Certificate or Resident Teacher Certificate in their subject area. Teachers hired after Jan. 8, 2002, must also pass various state exams demonstrating their knowledge of their subject area.

Teachers deemed not highly qualified have until June 30 to meet the minimum qualifications and be considered for rehiring.

Carter said some of the school’s teachers who were deemed not highly qualified were working to meet the ‘‘highly qualified” standard.

‘‘There’s a potential they might be retained, but at this time that is to be determined,” he said.

Donald J. Briscoe, president of the Prince George’s County Educators’ Association, said the county is doing ‘‘a pretty good job” telling under-qualified teachers what they need to do to meet the highly qualified criteria.

‘‘The positive is that all teachers will be highly qualified to teach the children, and it’s our understanding all teachers have been notified of what they needed,” said Briscoe, whose union represents 10,000 county educators.

But Briscoe said he worried that the school system could force out some good teachers who do not get adequately certified.

‘‘Of course I’m hoping as many teachers as possible get their highly qualified certificate because I would hate to lose any teachers who actually teach our children well,” he said.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, a school is targeted with an improvement plan after it has not made sufficient progress for two consecutive years on test scores in certain core academic subjects. Each year the school fails to achieve ‘‘Adequate Yearly Progress,” it must make changes based upon its improvement plan.

The arrangement to bring all core-subject teachers at the five schools to the highly qualified level was proposed by the county and recently approved by the Maryland State Board of Education.

‘‘The strategy were using here is intended to put the best teachers we can find in front of the students who need them most,” said John White, a spokesman for the county school district. ‘‘Only highly qualified teachers will be working in these schools.”

White said the school system has been preparing for the possibility of replacing teachers and was confident the required number of new teachers will be in place before the start of the next school year.

‘‘We have already begun working toward meeting our goal of 100 percent qualified teachers,” White said. ‘‘We’ve been doing a number of things with recruitment and retention over the last two school years to meet that goal. We’ve had a concentrated effort to recruit and retain and develop highly qualified teachers for our schools that are struggling the most and that’s starting to pay off.”

Options that the county did not pursue, but could have under the provisions of the school improvement program, include reopening the schools as charter schools, or transferring their control to the state or into private hands.

Despite the school system’s assurances, Tonya Miles, the PTA President at Ernest Everett Just Middle, wondered whether the Mitchellville school was going to be able to find 11 highly qualified teachers before the start of next school year.

‘‘It sounds like it will solve the problem maybe, but we have to be realistic,” Miles said. ‘‘Do we have that number of new teachers available? I don’t know that we do.”

She said it was her opinion that Ernest Everett Just would be better served by focusing solely on improving the education received by the school’s special education pupils, the one student subgroup that did not meet AYP the last two years at the school. Under the current plan, only one of the 11 teachers to be replaced at the school teaches special education.

‘‘Why are we not focusing on the one area that has not met AYP?” Miles asked. ‘‘We need to be focused on the areas that need the replacement rather than going out wholesale like this. I don’t know that we have the teachers streaming into this county to be able to do that.”

E-mail Jonathan Stein at jstein@gazette.net.