By Alex Malm
The Londonderry School Board held a hiring workshop meeting on May 17 as a way to get input from the community and staff on some of the challenges they have with recruiting new staff and retaining the staff that they have currently.
“As a board our focus is on listening,” said School Board Chair Amy Finamore.
It was explained by Human Resources Director Heather Meninger that they don’t have any teacher vacancies for the current school year and are working on filling positions for next year. She said that they have seen a lot of applicants for most of their teacher positions.
Director of Pupil Services Kim Carpinone said that at the beginning of the school year they have over 80 positions out of the 185 support staff positions including part time and full time employees.
“It is very typical for us to have a large turnover over the summer months,” said Carpinone.
This year she said that they had 20 that have remained unfilled.
Superintendent Scott Laliberte said that the biggest struggle is the support staff positions.
“That also includes dining services and our custodial positions,” said Laliberte.
Laliberte pointed out that the competition for labor is intense and since they have collective bargaining agreements they aren’t able to increase salaries outside of the contracts.
It was pointed out by Board member Amanda Butcher that the issue of finding staff isn’t just unique to Londonderry.
“This is a problem that is not unique to us, it’s a problem in all of NH,” said Butcher.
One of the staff members who spoke was Kathy Wally who said she has been a support staff employee with the district for 20 years.
“We don’t have enough support staff or subs,” said Wally.
Wally said that it means that sometimes they have to get pulled off from the student they are working with to help other students.
She said that despite the recent increase they still aren’t being paid enough. Noting that many have multiple jobs.
Wally said that the other major issue is that they aren’t automatically offered benefits unless they work a certain amount of hours, which is different than when she first started.
Jennifer LaBranche who teaches math at Londonderry Middle School also spoke saying that support staff is critical for the success of their classrooms.
“Our classrooms can’t function without the people who just got up here and spoke,” said LaBranche.
LaBranche said that she thinks that they need to have clear and consistent expectations from the District Office.
She also noted that technology is also a big issue for them. For example she said that she has an old smart board in her classroom that is on her wall but it doesn’t work.
LaBranche said that she also thinks they should go to 1 to 1 for student computers.
Said she has become an expert on unjamming the copy machine
Board member Bob Slater said that they received some good information during the meeting. He said that he also received a lot of different information during his visits to the schools and a lot of the information was the same that he heard during the meeting.
“We have to think outside of the box,” said Slater. He also noted that while he is glad that they have a good size fund balance he recognized the fact that a lot of it comes from not filling all their positions because they can’t find staff.
“It’s great to hear we have a fund balance of $700,000 to a million dollars. Most of that comes from unfilled positions,” said Slater.
Slater said that it’s also from teacher turnover.
“That’s where a bulk of our funds come from,” said Slater.
Slater said that he doesn’t want to hear about having a large fund balance again because it means that they filled all their positions.
Slater said that they need to look at restrictions and the pay scale and that they should look at what the average pay is for the state and look to get into that range.
He said that they can also have current staff help them with their recruiting efforts and compensate staff to help them with it.
Finamore said that one of the things that they look at during the next budget season is adding more technology.
Laliberte said that the leadership team would consider all the feedback they received and they can work on trying to incorporate some of the ideas brought up.