(Seguin) — The Seguin ISD is doing its part to help retain its teachers and all other employees for the next school year.
The Seguin ISD Board of Trustees unanimously approved a retention stipend for all those existing employees, who choose to continue their commitment to the school district and the students that it serves. The stipend includes $1,000 for teachers and $500 for all other employees.
Seguin ISD Superintendent Matthew Gutierrez says this type of bonus unfortunately is the latest in trends being used by districts to retain teachers and other staff.
“We are facing a staffing crisis in education – I think just like many other industries but particularly with education, we are starting to see fewer college students decide that they are going to enroll in a teacher prep program at a university. You are starting to see fewer people engage in alternative teacher preparation programs and teachers who are leaving the profession and teachers who are opting to stay home because it is a demanding role being a teacher. We experienced a significant hardship last summer because we received a lot of late notice resignations in late June or early July of last year for some very hard to fill positions particularly special education, CTE, Spanish, (and) dual language,” said Gutierrez.
Prior to this one-time stipend, the district’s Human Resources Department had already started other preparations for the next school year. Dr. Gutierrez says in effort to avoid the struggle of filling those last-minute vacancies next year, the district earlier this year had already rolled out another set of incentives — incentives that helped employees turn in those early resignation requests.
“We also did offer an early resignation notice incentive as well because of what we experienced last year and it was only teachers who had a window of time in which if they were thinking about resigning, there was an incentive for them to put in their notice early so that we can begin hiring teachers beginning in March. That incentive was for a time period. For several weeks, it was $1,000 and then for two weeks, it was $500 depending on the timeline in which they gave their notice,” said Dr. Gutierrez.
Dr. Gutierrez says thanks to extra funds available to the district, they’ll be able to pay out these one-time funds in October.
“If you look at our resignation list right now, it is quite lengthy but it’s because we did offer that incentive. We have some residual ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funding that came as a result of COVID that we are going to be able to utilize to be able to do this and one of the commitments that we made when we received this funding was to do what we can to recognize and award our teachers and so there have been some things that we have been able to do to provide one time stipends. So, this is going to be another measure to really recognize the work of not only teachers but all employees,” said Dr. Gutierrez.
Seguin ISD officials say an estimated $1 million is being allocated to cover these retention stipends for employees across the district.