Dr. Robertson, staff member, told the board that the district’s twentieth-day enrollment count shows the system is roughly 853 students below its projection — about 2% — and 538 fewer students compared with the prior-year count on the twentieth day. “With that many fewer students... we are actually staffed with 32 more teachers than the students in our seats based on our ratios,” Robertson said.

The staffing-model effect: staff explained the district’s model is enrollment-driven and operates with bands that can produce temporary plus-or-minus staffing impacts at particular schools. Robertson said some large schools, notably Howard and several high schools, account for much of the variance; Howard alone had about 200 fewer students than projected and was the largest single contributor to the gap.

Mitigation plan: Human-resources and school leaders set an initial goal to capture 25 resignations during the year from schools currently more than one teacher over their model allotment; as of the meeting, four of those slots had been captured (three vacancies closed and one resignation). Zach, staff member responsible for hiring, reported classroom-teacher fill rates historically have been high: the district opened school at about 99.3% of teacher positions filled earlier this year.

Special education shortage and incentives: staff described a pronounced shortage in specialized special-education credentials (referred to in the discussion as the 4-61 credential). Michelle (director of Special Education) and Dr. Brown, staff member, described difficulty recruiting school psychologists and speech-language pathologists and noted current pay for entry-level school psychologists is substantially below market. The district has used signing bonuses (e.g., about $8,000 previously) and outsourcing as stopgap measures and is proposing several steps:

- Expand recruitment pipelines (Grow Your Own, partnerships with local universities such as UTK, career-technical education and virtual hiring events).
- Invest in grow-your-own and EPP pathways that touch more than 200 potential candidates working toward licensure.
- Offer a recruitment stipend of $4,000 and a retention stipend of $6,000 for teachers who move into or remain in certain specialized special-education programs (IDS, COM, DCC, ME, behavior classrooms); staff estimated the cost of that add-on at about $400,000 with benefits.

Staff also proposed making the special-program retention/recruitment stipend part of the broader hard-to-staff compensation package and asking the board to preapprove funding in November so recruitment beginning in January can advertise the stipend to prospective hires. Dr. Brown said teachers in the program would have self-paced coursework and 18 months to complete required certification work.

Board questions: Trustees pressed staff for more granular data on whether teachers who move schools are truly retained by the district or simply shift within the system; staff said they will run those return-on-investment analyses as more years of data become available. Board members asked for more detail about vacancy locations, the number of special-education vacancies (staff cited roughly 12 current special-education vacancies) and intended timelines for the recruitment/retention incentives.

Ending: Staff committed to return with detailed turnover and retention numbers, a preapproval request for the proposed stipend within the hard-to-staff package, and further analysis of how internal transfers affect school-level stability. No formal vote was taken.