Peninsula School District outlines recruitment, retention and new paraeducator onboarding

The Peninsula School District board on July 15 heard a progress report on recruitment, retention and onboarding that outlined new outreach, mentoring and training efforts designed to keep and develop staff.

Dan Dizon, director of talent recruitment and retention, told the board the district is focusing on keeping current employees while improving outreach to recruit new teachers and classified staff. “Our best recruitment plan is to make sure that we keep the people that we have and also attract people,” Dizon said, outlining a mix of in-person recruitment events, student-led outreach and branded materials.

Dizon described a variety of recruitment activities: district presence at community events including Port of Tacoma and Tacoma Community College fairs, tent and banner displays, partnerships with universities and programs that bring student teachers into district classrooms, and social-media outreach. He said the district processed more than 50 student-teacher placements this year and reported strong returns from those pipelines.

Dizon also described retention work including structured follow-up with first- and second-year teachers. The district called more than 25 first- and second-year teachers last year to gather qualitative feedback for orientation and year-long supports. Dizon said administrators and cabinet members completed Danielson framework training (stages 1 and 2) and that the district is building mentoring and professional learning around instructional frameworks.

Katie Cartham, the district’s professional learning coordinator, detailed an altered onboarding program for paraeducators (teacher assistants). Washington requires 28 hours of first-year training for new paraeducators; the district redesigned the training to provide two in-person days front-loaded at the start of employment and embedded asynchronous modules for the remaining hours. Cartham said 49 new paraeducators hired last year received a full in-person orientation on their first Monday, followed by building shadowing and online modules. She said the district implemented the second required in-person day a year ahead of state timing so paras would have significant, classroom-ready training before their first days on the job.

Cartham said the change was made because in many districts the in-person days were backloaded late in the year; Peninsula’s model aims to give new paras baseline skills before they begin classroom work. “They feel like they have a handle on what the job is, what their expectations are,” Cartham said of para participants.

Dizon and Cartham described other supports: outreach to diverse applicant pools through LinkedIn and community events, summer onboarding for paras hired before the first day of school, and using AI-assisted tools to accelerate administrative tasks such as processing internship agreements and summarizing survey responses. Dizon said he has used AI tools to process exit-survey themes in minutes rather than hours and to draft mentor/mentee materials.

Board members thanked staff for the breadth of the work and noted the importance of retention, standardized evaluation training and community partnerships. The presentation concluded with staff saying they will return with additional baseline metrics and long-term outcome measures for retention and recruitment.