Before you start any change effort, it is essential to know where you are. By investing some time and energy to discover your district's strengths and weaknesses, to explore trends, and to hear from diverse viewpoints, you will be in a better position to identify and prioritize where you want to make changes. Here are some suggestions for getting started on assessing your recruitment and retention needs:

• Decide who should be involved in assessing your recruitment and retention needs. The more viewpoints you can include, the more accurate your assessment will be.
  
• Determine whether you need to do some preliminary assessment before forming a recruitment team or whether conducting a comprehensive assessment should be the first work of your recruitment team.
  
• Be prepared to gather data during the assessment process.

Although you may have a sense of what some of the recruitment and retention issues are, data will help to verify and sharpen your understanding of your district's needs and priorities for recruitment and retention. Data will provide a sound base from which to plan and will provide a baseline to measure your efforts.

Promising Strategies

• Use existing data to help identify and predict what your personnel needs will be over the next five years.
  
• Use data from other states and national sources to learn about factors that affect educator recruitment and retention.
  
• Consider using exit interviews and educator job satisfaction surveys to track educator recruitment and retention issues in your school.

Recruiting and retaining educators for your district is not a one person job. Building an ongoing recruitment program is the responsibility of everyone in a school community. A recruitment and retention team can help to:

• Identify the strengths and challenges of recruitment and retention in your district;
  
• Set short and long term goals for improving recruitment practices;
  
• Ensure an organized approach to your recruitment efforts;
  
• Make sure that recruitment and retention becomes an ongoing priority for your district;
  
• Bring skills, knowledge, and energy to the district to implement successful recruitment and retention practices.

Who Should be on Your Recruitment Team?

Your Recruitment Team will be more effective if it includes a diverse mix of people from the school community. The best composition of the Team for your district will depend on your specific needs. Here are some possibilities:

District Personnel:

• Recently hired educators
• Veteran educators
• Administrators
• Human Resource personnel
• Paraprofessionals
• Union Representatives

From the Community:

• School Board Members
• Parents
• Chamber of Commerce/Economic Development Representatives
• Business Leaders
• Marketing Professionals
• Retired Educators
• Representatives of Civic Organizations: Rotary, AAUW, etc.
• Human Resource Professionals

Once you have assessed your district's needs for recruitment and retention and identified your priorities for action, you are ready to plan how to achieve your desired outcomes.

Effective planning begins with knowing what outcomes you are trying to achieve and then developing a logical pathway to achieving those outcomes. Depending on what you have identified as priorities, you may need to plan a small defined project or a complex, long-term initiative.

Measuring the effectiveness of your efforts to attract, hire and retain educators will help to determine which of your efforts have yielded results. Ideally your assessment and planning process will lead to clearly defined, measurable goals and you will have a head start on your evaluation plan.