 of teacher licensing, causes and solutions to an impending teacher shortage. And our panel today will be Dr. Kerry Dassau, the superintendent of the Plymouth School System. Dan Mella, the assistant superintendent of the Plymouth School System. Jane Bourne, the superintendent for Chewbacca Falls. Kevin Brugge, I apologize Kevin if I got that name wrong. Superintendent of the Usbury School System. If you would like to come up please and introduce your introductory comments that you will be introducing the panel as we go along. I don't think I'm going to use the microphone. I think everybody probably can hear me well enough and they'll get in the way anyway. So we'll sit over here. We'll save it for the panel for later. So earlier today we had prepared the presentation of what's going on with Dan Mella with the Plymouth School District. And I went to Kerry and I said, Kerry in just a couple of words, why would anybody care about teacher licensing? And so we just talked briefly about that. And the reason that it's really important to think about is because teachers are hopefully the ones who are inspiring the people who you want to hire. The people who create new jobs in the area by becoming entrepreneurs and inventors and creators themselves. And so without qualified excellent teachers, that workforce which is already we know in a shortage mode currently will only continue to decrease over time. So what we need, we're experiencing a shortage. We've got some issues in education. But those issues are directly impactful to industry, business, government, all over the place. Those things matter. And so we need to talk about it. And we're very grateful that we're getting a chance to address this that has begun for some time. It's been happening for quite some time. It's increased in potential candidates. And talk about what do we think we could do about it? Because just like in the past, six, eight years ago, we're starting to talk about we have a big gap in manufacturing, the skills gap. We're missing people. We don't have the people to replace the phase boomers that are leaving. And so what are we going to do about it? And so we got together, we're talking, we were invited by manufacturers, the new manufacturers alliance started, all over the state these kinds of things were happening. And likewise, we think we need to do something similar for education so that we can be working to help supply workforce, but also to help create people who create workforce. So that's why it's important. That's why we thought we should talk about this with you today. And just as a quick little anecdotal story, a number of years back we were trying in the Plymouth School District, we were trying to deal with the changing environment and workforce. And we knew that our technical education program needed to be reshaped and revamped. So we began doing some things. We got into Project Lead the Way, which is an engineering curriculum. We did some other things. And we had some programming directives that we started. But what really happened that helped us grow was we hired over time now. There are three individuals that are TechEd teachers in our area, in our school district, and they're fantastic. The building, the changes, the program, didn't start drawing kids. It was those teachers. And the point that now Plymouth School District has fully one-sixth of all the youth apprentices come from Plymouth in the Cheboygan and Manitowoc region, the LTC region. One-sixth of those kids come from Plymouth. We have 600 students taking CTE courses. I mean, those kinds of things happen, not because we built the building or not because we changed the program or did Project Lead the Way, but because we had awesome teachers. And so they've inspired the growth. And so that's what we're going to talk about because when you get that to happen, you can make some big changes. So what do the numbers say? Currently, in this information across, this is the whole country, where are we with teachers? Where do we have a gap? I'll read it. I know it's kind of small. There's some small numbers up here. Just the big blue side says elementary education and teaching. There's been a decline in education program completions over the last four or five years. Almost 18,000 people that are going into education programs have decreased. We've got a decrease in secondary education by over 4,000. These kinds of numbers indicate and they're similar in the state of Wisconsin, we'll get to, that we don't have kids going into education as a major in college. That's a problem. For example, teacher licenses, this is a nationwide issue, teacher licenses granted in California from Title II from the Department of Education, a huge decrease. Teacher license granted in New York State, a huge decrease. But at the same time that we're having a decrease and a total number of licenses granted, we're also seeing an increased need for teachers. That means there are more students, more programs, more places for them to be. So obviously you can see the gap. Less teachers coming out or going into education programs, more teachers needed in schools throughout the country, and we've got a gap. If you notice the, it says all occupations, there is a predicted 14% need. That's all of us together. We're all of our workforces together. High school teachers not as big of a problem as elementary and kindergarten teachers where we seem to, there just are more of them to begin with. And so that's probably where the, where the barriers happen. So we've got a gap. We've got a problem nationally. There's all kinds of discussion in our panel. We'll talk about this and they'll have ideas and you can ask questions about what to do about it. What do we think we should do about it? And for example, this is University of Virginia study. It's a national survey looking at two different proposals. What should we do about a shortage? Should we, on the first hand, say as an example, forgive scholarships or college loans to teachers that's on the bottom here that teach for at least four years in low income community or in a subject there where there is a shortage. So there should be that kind of loan forgiveness for all kinds of things. We have a couple of programs like that in the state of Wisconsin already. Teaching in rural areas in northwestern Wisconsin. There's a bit of a loan buyback tax credit program. So you can see a lot of people agree with doing that kind of thing. Certain people that are surveyed. But then the second says allow schools to hire individuals who haven't yet completed their training under teaching credential. A lot less support for those types of things where you just hire somebody who hasn't been through any kind of education training or those types of things. People don't, moms and dads, citizens don't like to hear that as much. It sounds like they would like their teachers that are working with their children to have some expertise and some background. What about some trends in the state of Wisconsin? How many people in here are in manufacturing or have some sort of technical positions that they're hiring? Okay. All of these, I included these because I've done a lot of work over the past with the skills gap and work with the new manufacturers' alliance and so science certification students, math certification students and world language because our technical, our manufacturers are going global. So I just picked these three. They're all in shortage. Everybody is decreasing in the state. This is for students going into teacher education programs. It's a decrease everywhere so we've got a 30% decrease statewide and that's private schools and public schools in the state of Wisconsin, colleges I'm talking about. But specifically for Sheboygan County, heavy, heavy manufacturing, retail manufacturing, we've got even a bigger decrease. Students going into science, math, world languages, culture we're looking at over, average those together, over a 50% decrease in just the last few years. So that's what's in the pipeline for potential teachers to teach the students and to inspire the kids to go into those kinds of fields. Just as an example, Devin and I started teaching, he's a little bit older. So he started teaching a couple years before I did in 1990. I started teaching in 1992 so I just picked this. The U.S. Department of Ed has tracked areas of shortage in education for forever as long as they've been doing it as long as they could get that information. So I picked the year I started. Back when we started, Devin, the only areas that were really in shortage were special ed and learning disabilities. Let's look at current. This year, you can see, again, manufacturing interests, health care interests, career tech ed, business ed, all this whole list, in fact, the list continues. There are 22 total areas within education. That means there are predicted not enough teachers going through the system whether it's the alternative system or the college-based system to fill the potential need to teach students in the state of Wisconsin. This information also, they have the same information for every state in the union so you can kind of look at it. It's a similar pattern but we have a lot of issues. A lot of areas where we are going to be short to consume. And our panel will talk a little bit. They're going to be able to talk a little bit more about the stories that they've experienced over the last few years of hiring and kind of what they're seeing and the trends that they're personally experiencing in hiring. But we've got shortage areas and a lot more than we used to. Kevin and I were talking about how much more competition there was for he and I to get positions earlier so we're proud of that. We're patting ourselves in the back because we beat out a much larger field at that point. Last year over the last three years we've had a 3% decrease. This is every type of teacher credential in the state of Wisconsin. We've had a 3% decrease just in the last three years in total people credentialed as initial educators. Now you would expect looking at the previous numbers that we ought to have less but we ought to have a bigger percentage right there because we've got such a decrease in the pipeline. But as our panel will talk about in a little bit there are some alternative certification routes that people are choosing to go versus the traditional route and they're going to have some opinions about the quality and makeup and outcomes from those compared to a traditional four year, five year, six year teacher education program. But there still is a gap that exists of initial teachers that we need compared to what's out there. The interesting trend that's been going on is that we've always had traditionally in the state of Wisconsin we've been a net gainer of migrant teachers into the state of Wisconsin. Wisconsin's always had a pretty strong reputation in education and so over time we've had in general more people that have received their teacher training or gone through university in another state coming here and getting their initial certification than we've had leaving. But since 2011 we have reversed that trend now at a negative migration rate of 50%. So that's a big change. We're not getting help like we used to get either from people moving into the state to come and live here. And this is not dissimilar from many people in this room hiring for healthcare, manufacturing and those kinds of things for seeing some of that as well. We've been working on addressing those problems and we've been partnering to try to address those problems and we're trying to give you this information and maybe we can form partnerships and do something to deal with this problem as well. I have a graph on there. I gave myself a special effect and forgot about it. So this is from Jim Morgan from the foundation and he spoke at our meeting. Anyway this is a slide that he had provided for us then just in general, our demographics in this state don't vote well and we all know that and so we're all in this together in that we've got labor demand which is all of us and the supply of people is not going to be potentially meeting them so we have to figure out ways to deal with that and so again this is not a unique problem for us it's also something that we've been working on together in business as well. Plus, you've seen this one before I think in the last presentation we have a lot of migration out when the kids are young and a little migration back when the kids are older and so the net result isn't a wash we still are behind over time and so we're losing our college graduates now all of us teachers some are coming back but obviously you can see that not everybody's coming back now this is a backward looking graph exactly what will happen in the future and that's what we're trying to address together by marketing and some place better and all the rest of the things we're working on together so we've got the issues of decreased teachers available and everything else so why is that happening or what are some of the potential causes for that well behind me shows the typical teacher program now that is a college based program and obviously just like all other costs for post-secondary education those that increase just like everybody else's however a major change that's occurred in the world of education when Kevin and I went through school for education when you did as well we didn't have practice practices core foundations of reading practices to at TPA those are all end point cut-offs their exams that you take on your way through the system I believe they're all all of that money goes to Pearson they're all Pearson based tests and so as you move through the system you might be doing fantastically well and then you take foundations of reading exam the stats on that are about 40% all of students that take it in the state of Wisconsin have to retake it it's one of those things like the bar where you can take it again and again until you pass but there's a high percentage of people that take it again and again until they pass and so there's a cost every single time you take that and there's a potential barrier and some discouraging or some things that stand in your way from you wanting to work with kids to actually finishing your degree and those exams are kind of just in my opinion they're unproven and there is some there's some research that shows that they're not really correlated to ultimate teacher success but kids got to take they have to take all those things to the additional expense so there are additional barriers to actually finishing a degree what else is going on we all know that nobody goes into education because they want to get rich but this as a percentage of this is an interesting graph if you look at countries across the world and how people are compensated for their work this is a ratio of salary for anybody who earned a college degree in these countries after 15 years of experience and full-time, full-year work and so you can see in the United States we are right here we are 0.6 at a ratio so we're over half way to a full one different than that was a good math wasn't it from what typically people would earn that of a college degree moving towards after 15 years of work we all know that there's not a great financial there never has been a great financial reward for teaching but then you compound that with this problem which is they've been doing this since the 60's looking at job satisfaction of all kinds of labor force and so just taking a look at the teacher one job satisfaction among teachers has reached a 25 year low and if you look at some of the reasons and studies that look at that as well it relates to things like standardization of the profession, things that are coming from the accountability movement our problem for people autonomy within the profession you just earned a bachelor's degree you're somewhat of an expert and then you go into the teaching world and you do all that swim and everything else we do that, we try not to do that but there's a lot more of that in education than there used to be and then there's a public perception problem and I kind of equate this to the same issues that manufacturing has and we talk about this in our new manufacturing alliance meetings and when we're talking those types of issues you know the old manufacturing the dirty kind of no future type of thing that we were trying to dispel and get rid of because it's a lot better it's a lot of chance to grow it's not that same environment that your parents heard about it's great well we've got that kind of issue that's developed over the last few years not the last few years but over time about teaching as well I think Kevin might talk to this a little bit later but there are perceptions out there that it isn't as meaningful a profession teachers are somewhat they're not looked upon as fondly as maybe in the past and so there's just work that needs to be done to make it that for people to understand that it still is a noble profession and it can be a wonderful calling and all this stuff that you see in the news media and the blog posts out there are not true or that there are other ways to look at things or we need to do a better job of espousing the positives for education so that's kind of where we are we've got less teachers coming through college we've got greater demands on the back end and so somewhere in the middle we've developed a gap and so we're experiencing a shortage so what are we going to do about it that's what panel is going to talk about a little bit they'll explain about their what their thoughts are about the issue and then you can ask questions as well so that was my part was the background alright you have it on your sheet too okay so what have you observed in hiring trends for teachers over the last five years so first of all thank you for having us here I'm Kevin Brigant the district administrator in Moosburg I'm a teacher I talked for 17 years at the high school level and was fortunate enough to become an elementary principal for eight years and now had a door open to become district administrator so my whole career has been spent in education I think one of the biggest things that we're seeing that's different is for us I'm sure it's very similar to all organizations culture is what really makes a difference but we do a lot of hiring in April and May and we hire don't get to experience our culture until the following late August or September so one of the things we didn't see before at least I didn't see before is we'll have people sign contracts in April and continue going out applying for positions and looking for better options and that may have been maybe commonplace in the private sector it was not as common in education and we'll be left with people who we think we've gotten placed in August having to flip years maybe even September particularly in the high demand areas so we're looking at creative ways in terms of our contract how can we expose people to our culture earlier those kinds of things have really been part of it so late resignations I think the other thing that we're seeing is a lot more moving between local school districts and we continually as a big debate our superintendent's group really I think gets along well supports one another but it's also we have the responsibility to our students and the idea of you know pulling teachers from other districts and what that means if they're in front of kids somewhere they're making a difference so we take a great teacher deployment and they can't fill that position they're all our kids and we try to have the mentality of the Usberg kids are not the only kids that matter they're all our kids so just changing demographics in terms of demand changing dynamics in terms of contracts have been a few of the things that we're seeing in that regard and I concur with Kevin I want to thank everyone for having us here today this is a really important subject and I've been in education for 30 years so it's my life it's what I do it's my passion and I will say that over the last maybe five years or so it's been it's been for me to see some of the things that Dan's talked about and live it and hear the voices of the teachers and be able to try to help them understand that they are still valued in that they still have a very noble profession so we do as Kevin said try to build a culture for that to happen within our school district in many different ways probably the trends that we've seen the most I can tell you that if you would have asked me about three or four years ago to hire an elementary teacher I would probably have had 350 applicants I probably now have about 50 which is okay we can still hire elementary pretty well if you're looking at the areas of special education technical education agriculture business there are pretty few last year I know we only had five agriculture teachers graduate from the agriculture program in the state so if you're looking for a teacher in agriculture you're really not going to get someone and I will also tell you that the closer it gets to the beginning of the school year the more difficult it is to find teachers and at that point in time is when you really do do the thing that you don't want to do is you hire teachers that don't have the qualifications or even though sometimes even the certifications that you need them to have and you provisionally license them and then next year try again if you can try a little earlier we do see that trend happening a little bit more the other thing that I will tell you is that Kevin spoke about transferring the teachers from one school district to the other later in the game and that happens all the way up through October at Thompson maybe even more into the school year and the thing that that concerns me the reason why that concerns me is that if you look at the research when a teacher changes in a classroom for a student oftentimes you'll see a significant amount of the students lose up to three months of education backslide that you have to pick up and be able to change because of the transition because of the student having to think differently with the different teacher in the classroom so when a teacher leaves the classroom to go to another school district because they're getting a better offer if you will in October it really isn't you know the best interest of the kids and that's really what we're here for and that concerns me a lot when we start getting into that cycle. I do would like to thank you for this opportunity I think we're in a position now where we have to really look creatively at what we're doing with our staffing and understanding that this shortage does have a direct impact on what we do with our students and the programs we can offer. I will echo exactly what Carrie and Kevin have said the thing I guess the trend we're seeing too is that we're starting to look for internally at our own staff to see what other skills they have and can they move into some of the positions they have or can we grow them internally can we take an elementary teacher and grow him or her to be a science teacher at the high school so we're really starting to look at that we also are working with partnerships with UW, Sheboygan, LTC we were working with them before but it's taken on a different tack. Two years ago Sheboygan Falls did not meet Boston Tech Ed teacher and to a neighboring district which as Kevin said we do work closely together and they are all our kids and that's how we have to look at it we don't want to be competitive but unfortunately that does happen sometimes so we went to LTC and said what can you do for us how can we work together to make this happen and LTC was able to provide us with an instructor and we were able to formulate our program and not lose that program because that's a really popular program in our school but we're really starting to see more of that. We're also looking at people who are not educators and maybe that are members of our community or other people in our community that we know and would they be interested in considering a job in teaching and here's what you have to do if here's how we could help you. We brought people in to shadow teachers to say you know this is something that you would like to do even former students who have gone into teaching and said nope this is not for me invited back to say hey would you like to shadow today and you know go back to your elementary work with your teacher that you had you know ten years ago we're just trying to find creative ways to engage the profession again and I think as we mentioned up here too we have a responsibility to engage our own students and our communities about our schools and about how important education is education is the cornerstone I truly believe that I'm a lifetime person also in education this is my 30th year I have a daughter going into education and my husband and I are both educators and you know when she came to us and said she wanted to be a teacher it was like okay take a deep breath but yes she's got the passion she's got she's driven she's got some natural ability why wouldn't I want her to do this because all kids deserve good teachers so I think that's we're really just trying to be more creative we have to look out of the box and I guess at this point in time we certainly understand what many of you have been saying for a long time in manufacturing and other areas healthcare about how difficult the short it is making your jobs and to produce what you want to produce the quality you want to do and we're seeing ourselves in that position more and more every day on the perception thing a little bit American society quarterly does a Harris pull Harris does a pull on their behalf the Milwaukee General Sentinel had this out recently so just alluding to what Dan had shared about the perception because I think it's something that we need to work together just a segue before I share just a couple of pieces from the survey my position in my role as district administrator has really expanded the opportunity to work with local businesses in Moosburg and we just had a shabuagan chamber those partnerships were things that I was not aware of as a teacher and particularly as a building principal they have been phenomenal so we share so many of the same challenges and I think the great analogy is the concerns of perceptions around manufacturing that have been mentioned a couple times today and we're we're suffering with those same challenges so what are the opportunities for us to flip that around and you think that the older I get the toughest days are the ones where we grow so I look at the big hurdles that we have there's really an opportunity for neat things to happen in the next four or five years and that's exciting so here's a couple of the things from the survey that was in the General Sentinel 90% of parents would encourage their children to pursue careers in science technology engineering and math but not teaching jobs in those fields so that's a concern in a separate survey of just educators just educators talking about their children only 29% of people who are actually in teaching would encourage their kids to go in it so we've got a problem internally where we have to be responsible when we find ourselves talking negatively, complaining whatever we've got to flip that around that's our responsibility in us so I think that that's really a concerning thing 55% of the parents were more likely to encourage would be more likely to encourage a career path teaching if the compensation was better 70% of parents 77% of educators worried that their child wouldn't make enough money as a teacher I think that's a message we have to flip around too because it's not about that it's not about we want to have so it's a perception thing they certainly want to have family sustaining wages but we have some challenges there that have to be flipped around as well so I really think that those are hurdles that we can work through together as our partnerships continue to grow I was talking to a school board member from Green Bay just recently the current cohort of graduates in the education program at UW Wisconsin Green Bay none of them are going to stay in Wisconsin all of them are moving out so that's related to that perception thing talks about the migration out that Dan mentioned and I think we're also seeing leadership wise so just a little bit of background for me my dream was to be a teacher I never considered or had aspirations of being a district administrator but our system was set up that you moved up in the salary schedule by getting more credits so I went and got my master's degree got my master's degree from Lakeland got a certification in administration and then that opportunity opened I think this is a doorway I should try to walk through and it's been good right now graduate programs across the state are just they're nonexistent in ad leadership that pipeline it hasn't been talked about but I think great leadership is going to inspire good teachers as well so it's all connected together so just some changes in dynamics and growing our own leaders internally and I think we can probably learn best from our business partnerships and what that can look like and not be stuck in our ways that certainly happened in healthcare we have the lowest healthcare costs in our CISA and a lot of it is things that the business community has done several years before us and we're learning we may learn slowly but we're getting there good question is what are the potential solutions that maintain and improve the quality of teachers earning their license to teach okay this particular question I think is tricky because certainly I know that the slide that Dan put up that showed all the tests and everything that teachers have to go through in order to get their teachers degree he talked about them as barriers and I guess I would agree with him on that they are barriers in a sense in which they don't necessarily correlate to what happens afterwards it's something you know it's like some of the tests we take like the ACT test for example correlates very well with what you took in high school but there isn't any good research that's independent of the ACT company that says that having a high ACT is going to make you successful in college so he's right about the assessments and stuff that the students have to take but I always worry about when we start dwindling the quality of what we're producing as far as highly qualified teachers go the professional teaching is very complex you have to inspire you have to engage even though you're a technical education teacher you still have to learn how to teach technical reading you have to learn how to use applied math you can't just be someone who knows how to well but you have to be someone who knows how to well who knows engineering, who knows construction and can teach five different things in a day it's very complex and I will tell you that I went to operations round table like two or three months ago and we were talking about the shortage and John Rogers did ask has anyone around the table lowered the quality or the expectations of the people you're hiring in order to fill the shortage that you have for employees and no one raised their hand I mean everyone still expects to have a highly qualified employee come through their door and they're not going to lower their quality or their expectations because it's very important for them to have quality people well I can tell you that I see that trend happening in education and it scares me it really does we now have a law in our state that allows someone to be able to come in and be a technical education teacher without a bachelor's degree without a teacher's license and it is very scary and I know that maybe we're desperate but I think that that desperation can impact us to a point where our students are going to suffer and I think eventually we have to take a stand and say not that being said I do think that there are some quality alternative programs out there that can take people as Jean said that have different levels of education and bring them in and we can help them get that teacher license in a highly qualified manner and they don't always have to take the traditional route I also think that there should be some incentives for students to be able to go into the teaching field and one of the loan buy back program I know I read some research the other day where they talked about using some of the interest from the federal loans where the students are paying from the college loans and being able to give some payback to students who stay in education in certain hard defined areas but I think that there are some solutions out there I'm concerned that we're jumping too quickly to solutions and in turn what's happening is we are going to have an issue in our classrooms with our students and everyone says well as a superintendent you know you have the ability to hire who you want you know local control which I'm all for but but I can tell you that it isn't local control anymore when teacher colleges are shutting down right now we have two teacher colleges in the state for technical education teachers and one of them is already down at this point doesn't have enough students going into technical education to be able to run their teacher program so now we have stout left and as those programs continue to shut down our ability to hire highly qualified people continues to diminish so we have to be really careful when we start jumping to solutions and finding solutions that make sense and not solutions that are quick fixes and are going in the long run hurt us. I guess the only thing I would add to that is I think you know working internally with our own staff and trying to grow our own has been really effective for us I think the other thing is we have to really take a long hard look at the programming that's out there to prepare teachers as I look at my daughter's programming through her college and I'm looking at all the different things that she has to do and knowing the practical application she needs to learn the applied piece we need to make sure that we're giving those people that go into education those students that go in that are getting a really good solid experience and that see what the teaching profession really is all about. There's so many positives and sometimes I don't think they get those experiences and I think that's in one area. I also think going back to what I said before and I think we would all agree we have to make sure that we're promoting our profession in a different way. We have to be positive about what it is we do every day. I don't go to work every day for 30 years thinking this is a job for me this is my passion this is what I have to do and I have many people say to me how do you do this every day how do you come back the next day to do this and you probably have people say that to you as well but it's something I believe strongly in and I think we as educators who have a strong passion for our profession just as you do in your work areas we need to instill that we need to make sure that we are sharing that on a positive way and on a more regular basis. I think the connections that we have made as Kevin had spoke to very eloquently about you know working with businesses working with other entities I'm excited about the someplace better as our Sheboygan County group gets together as superintendents and we talk about how do we promote education in Sheboygan County it's not about Woosburg versus Plymouth versus Sheboygan Falls it's about how do we show people coming to Sheboygan County that the education since the public schools and all schools in Sheboygan County are very strong and that they're doing a good job in supporting their kids and so I think those are some of the other things that we have to continue to do and I guess one of my questions would be we touched on a lot of how to prepare as soon as you get interested in it but I didn't hear a lot about recruitment efforts to Sheboygan County in general I heard Plackville and I heard EWGV I didn't hear you know we talked about agriculture I didn't hear EWGV falls what kind of recruitment efforts do we go on site to colleges and recruit in person by showing them some place better materials what kind of recruitment efforts do we do on site trying to attract people to our area because we know once we get people here we can keep them but how do we get them here how do we make that connection That's a great question and one that part of the answer would be when Dan and I applied for biology teaching positions we had 100 you know there were 100 applicants 300 for an elementary position so we've been stuck in the mud just expecting people to come to us and we've been slow learners so I can tell you in the last few years it's been a dramatic difference in terms of how we proactively recruited going to different job fairs being in regular contact with universities across the state and sometimes even out of the state we're seeing more school districts that are proactively recruiting when I was serving as elementary principal I would get a brochure from Kimberly School District just about once a month explaining an open administrative position that they had those kinds of things using things like LinkedIn those were not the norm in education and I think we're learning that hey we need to get on the ball and not just expect people to show up at our door so I think you're seeing a big change in an area that we did very poorly for a long time but we have a long way to go Austin I can tell you that some of the things that that we've done about two years ago we started to notice it and the students were graduating and they had to declare what it was that they wanted to go to school for we were down to maybe one student a year that was interested in going into teaching so we now for the last two years we have a course that we actually teach for juniors and seniors and it's kind of conducive to education one on one we work with the UW Sheboygan to work with it and we have students who enroll in that class and we help them understand more about what teaching is and what a great profession it can be in and of course a little things that they're going to this year I think we have I think seven students that I was able to count and I think that we're seeing that grow a little bit we also last night held our own job there at Horizon Elementary School for anybody who is interested in being an elementary teacher and what we do is we bring our best of the best there and we have little centers that the candidates can go through and interview talk about math, talk about language arts, how do you teach language arts what's the math problem that you use talk with the principals, talk about interpersonal skills that we value and I think it was pretty successful and this is our second year doing it but we pretty much just put an invite out for everyone to come and just walk through because we do believe that we can not only bring people in because of salary but we can bring people in because we have a culture that they're going to enjoy and like and if we can expose them to that culture then maybe they'll get excited about teaching with us the echo of the things that they said the one thing that's weirdly happened in our district these last couple of years is that when people have come to us and taken a position they're actually going out and recruiting people that they've worked with before come to this school district, it's a great place to work which we've not seen before we really haven't had to have that we are, as they both have said we're continuing to put efforts together that's just not something we've had to do when you put out a position and you get 50 or 60 applicants you're hoping out of those applicants to find a quality person and you do so that's a rethinking a retraining of how we do it but I'm excited that our own teachers are going out purposefully and saying this is a great place to work you want to come to Sheboygan Falls so that's exciting and I'm telling them to expand their message to say Sheboygan County because it's all of us, it's just not Sheboygan Falls although I'll take the good teachers if they comment in a lot of areas a lot of university degrees do not meet the salaries they once did so it's not just an I think an issue to teaching but I don't know I'm curious as to what UW leadership is doing to try to help change that perception and retool students to occupations that have the ability to have their jobs and benefits that they can enjoy the only thing that I've seen so far is UW Sheboygan being a two-year college they've created some four-year degrees that stay local they're getting people out into the classrooms earlier they're doing things like that but I don't think a formal conversation with the UW system has happened between us I just see some of their efforts are more aggressive getting out and looking for educators I'm really impressed with what UW Sheboygan is doing they see the need they're willing to work with us and they have some of us that teach the courses they have they're getting into our schools more early on in the four-year degree that's what the only example I have I guess the one example that I think what we've seen locally is the partnership between Lakeland and MTC and the fact that we can actually help our students who are interested in the technical education areas get that degree with the combined effort between the two places and I know when I was reading the students as they were leaving and what they were looking at doing in their career I noticed that one of our teachers inspired one of the students and he wants to be a technical education teacher so I went to Dan and said let's get him in that program quick because that way we can keep him here and hopefully when one of our teachers leaves we can have someone waiting in the wings to teach for us but I think that's probably a really good thing that we have to start talking about because when you do talk with the UW systems they just throw their hands up and say you know more what teacher colleges or teacher programs are closing down all over the place and that's what I'm hearing but you're right we probably need to take a better look at it I think these have started so much earlier and it's too late for the discussion by the time we get to the university level so we're talking very significant changes in the state around academic career planning starting in sixth grade and Dan mentioned the youth apprentice shift program we're heavily involved in that as well so I think when we talk about young people graduating with $100,000 or more or the debt and potential options for a career there's just a mismatch there we need to take responsibility if we wait for or even coach or put that responsibility on the university systems it's way too late we need to be doing that with our kids and I think we are and again it's another example of really good partnerships in education where we're not only our most recent discussions we're not only around expanding youth apprenticeships but then co-ops there's some really neat things happening with Sheboygan school district and red raider manufacturing that have now expanded to all of the districts in the county and I think we're on a really good path so I think we need to own that we need to own that at our level could you comment on the praxis? I shouldn't say it a lot as long as I get the mic to her What exactly would you like to know about the praxis? I'd like to know why you reacted that way What is it? It's an exam it's basic it's reading, math it's something that the students take in order to they get to a certain point actually it's twice within their college career to be a teacher they have to pass two exams and then I guess those exams aren't really in my mind as bad as Dan probably feels differently and that's okay since diverse opinions are excellent but I think for me the worst one is the ITPA and I have to be very careful but the ITPA is where the teachers have to videotape themselves and then they have to do some reflection on the videotape and it's $300 and if they don't do it right the first time they have to do it again and again and I guess I wonder what we could do with the money that is being paid for these types of things and maybe making our teachers better when they get to us in the professional development and even compensating them better but I think that sometimes there's these areas it's just like standardized testing where why does every student have to take the ACT when not all students are going to a college education and I always will question who is benefiting from that particular rule and is it really the students? Does this really make the teachers better? Does it really make the students better? and I would probably say that you should look into that and see the reason I reacted that way is because I think we're making young people jump through loops and a lot of people are making a lot of money off of roadblocks for kids. I'm not saying that the assessments themselves don't have some merit but that doesn't seem to be the primary motivation so I have a little bit of a negative reaction when I hear that because I don't think it's necessarily as altruistic as what it's portrayed to be and it presents a roadblock I think when you look at the amount of money that goes into the accountability issues with education I really believe that that's taking a huge chunk of what we could be putting in to making the profession so much better and not that there shouldn't be any accountability but it has to make sense and it's gotten way out of control. The TPA or is it the legislator? It's not the TPA that came in and raised the tide straight on. A lot of what you see coming in it has to do with the waiver for the no child left behind and then the waiver was written so that in 2014 all schools had to be 100% proficient in so many areas like closing the gap etc etc and then a waiver was written for the no child left behind in that waiver there were a lot of hoops that we had to jump through in order to not have to follow that no child left behind piece it's so convoluted and complicated even when you look at the report cards and stuff that the school districts now receive a lot of what you get exceeds expectations meets expectations a lot of times you can be a low performing school district and exceed expectations because you closed the gap and when you close the gap what that means is that the gap between the students who are achieving very high and maybe the low socioeconomic students or the students with disabilities who are achieving lower you close that gap and it doesn't necessarily mean you're doing a better job it just means that you're closing the gap so you can have a lower top group and so there's so many things that you know convoluted and that's part of what happens to teachers in the profession is that they're evaluated on these things and they have to close the gap yet they have to leave the students who are up here sort of behind because we're working on closing that gap because if not the report cards are not doing a good job so I would tell her that there's no better profession in the world and I would tell her that no other profession would exist than teaching there's nothing like a hug from an elementary kid and it's really hard to have a bad day in an elementary school if you're having a bad day go to a kindergarten room for a while and everything seems okay but it's kind of like having grandkids you don't have to keep them so I would echo what Carrie said and Kevin said it is the best profession there's not a lot of words to have that feeling when you see a child learn to read for the first time you learn something that they've been struggling with for the first time it is certainly not just a job it's a passion and you get that warm fuzzy feeling every day even as a superintendent when that 4k air comes and blows his nose on the side of your pants it's pretty exciting because he's pretty excited about something so you just get that warm fuzzy feeling and it's hard to replace it with anything and I would also say because my journey was middle school teacher and I remember those students who they struggle they can't they're just not reading and we're doing everything we can to get them to read and come around January or February it clicks and before you know it it's like whoa they just take off and there's no other feeling when you see something like that happen but then when I went into for a while I was the assistant superintendent in dance position and my job was to teach teachers and when I see those same types of aha moment and in doubt I get that same feeling so all the way through you know teaching is just one of those very rewarding professions I guess the last thing I would tell is don't believe everything she hears talk to people who are doing the job and find out for herself if that's what she wants to do one sentence, thanks a lot I think all of us have experienced that there's really nothing that brings more joy than when we can do something for somebody and they're not going to give us any return just the satisfaction that comes from service and I don't know another profession other than education that provides many opportunities for them and to watch kids grow but that satisfaction I can't imagine another profession that parallels that other questions one suggestion before we wrap up as we're thinking about this I don't know how often you're looking for topics but I would think that it would be an awesome topic to have a first right forum not from the standpoint of people from schools coming up and asking for a moment more money, the complexity of school funding I think could be really valuable to have a discussion about Devin Lemming and Terry Cosmar from Woosberg and we have spent a lot of time with them helping them to understand it is extremely complex so I wouldn't want the focus to be around we need more money around just the value in collective members and stakeholders in the community understanding how that works, how it's changed all those kinds of things so I would just pass that out there for whatever it's worth if you're ever looking for topics thank you for having us thank you a couple seconds for a couple quick announcements after saying thank you to our panel again for coming to speak with us in such an authoritative manner tonight there will be a ribbon cutting beginning at 5 p.m. at the solo estate line read at County Road Def at Cascade our June focal point topic will be tapping to your entrepreneurial spirit which will be held at the Cheboygan Chamber on Wednesday June 15th 7.30 a.m. to 9 a.m. our panels will be from the SEDC Score Mentors and the SBDC over lunch hour on June 15th from noon to 1.30 we'll be having a hot topic presentation and a Q&A on the new minimum salary rules for the Department of Labor June, business after hours will be rebuilding together at the Harbor Lights on Wednesday June 29th at 5 p.m. and I'd like to encourage you for the first Friday form in July don't come there will be no first Friday form in July but please do join us in August for a discussion on the Affordable Care Act health care reform I think that will be a very interesting and timely topic as well. Thank you for coming and please come again in August