Eagle County School District accountability committee: Solutions needed for disruptive behaviors and staffing challenges

As the Eagle County School District prepares for its annual budgetary process, its board of education is considering new and creative ways to address persisting challenges like hiring, recruiting and student behavior.

On Wednesday, April 10, the Board of Education heard recommendations from this year’s District Accountability and Advisory Committee. This group is comprised of parents, teachers, administrators, school board members and community members. The school district is required by the Colorado Department of Education to have the advisory group, which convenes throughout the year to assess the school district’s effectiveness, adequacy and efficiency.

These recommendations will help drive decisions as they head into their annual budgetary process as well as into negotiations with the local teachers union.

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“The budget will formally be adopted in June and negotiations happen in May, so your presentation, your recommendations are very timely and will play into these important decisions that are happening in the next two months,” said Superintendent Philip Qualman.

From the fall to the spring, this committee hears presentations from each school as well as from each district department on their top triumphs and challenges. It is based on these presentations that the group’s recommendations are made.

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David Russell, the Gypsum Creek Middle School principal and this year’s DAAC coordinator, said that he was impressed by and grateful for “the thoughtful ideas and conversations and heard the passion that went into the recommendations” this year.

This year, after the committee came up with ideas, comments and themes and put them on large sticky notes — it had some help from AI to create its final report, Russell added.

“We took those sticky notes and fed them into three different AI-generative helpful tools and let them summarize and create some sub-themes out of each one,” Russell said, adding that he took those, combined them, and rewrote them to better capture the nuance and discussions had through the process.

Through this work, the committee came up with four main areas that the district should focus on moving forward: prioritizing intervention, addressing student behavior and behavioral health, recruiting and retention.

While each category came with suggested solutions, the committee noted that many of these issues are overlapping. For example, behavioral challenges relate to retaining educators, Russell said, noting that teachers want to stay and focus on teaching kids and student learning, but that having to address distracting student behaviors themselves can detract from this.  

Prioritizing intervention

During the pandemic, the school district received an influx of federal dollars through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, also known as ESSER funds. Among other things, these dollars allowed the district to hire interventionists and multi-tiered system of support coordinators.

In total, the Eagle County School District received just over $10 million in emergency relief through three rounds of ESSER funding from the federal government (and two ESSER supplementals) and one batch from the statewide Coronavirus Relief fund.

Among the things these funds went toward were 22.55 full-time positions for intervention, credit recovery and permanent subs. However, as the last of these funds were spent, the district no longer had the funding to support these positions. DAAC also identified the loss of these funds as a priority in its 2023 and 2022 recommendations.

“As the schools are dealing with the loss of ESSER funds and are trying to really tackle the learning challenges that are in front of us with academic growth and achievement, interventionists and intervention practices and curricular supports in the classroom and schools are super important,” Russell said.

The committee recommended that the school board prioritize funding for interventionists and support staff positions. The group also emphasized the importance of schools having autonomy to fit this to their unique needs. 

“This includes the necessary training to build capacity of existing staff and school leaders. This prioritization should be included at all levels from Pre-K to high school and should not be limited to certified staff,” reads the report, adding that support staff can help reduce interventionists’ workloads.

Addressing student behavior and behavioral health

Over the past few years, many schools have reported a “rise of disruptive behaviors in classrooms,” Russell said, adding that he’s also heard similar patterns over the past four years in neighboring school districts.

This year’s committee identified a few potential solutions including increased and equitable allocation of mental health resources — to focus on school population, level of adversity or areas of high trauma — ensuring students get healthy, and desirable, breakfasts and lunches, implementing consistent behavioral management strategies, and continuing the district’s collaboration with partners like Your Hope Center and Vail Health, Russell said.

This category has also risen to the top of previous DAAC recommendations in various forms. Last year, the group identified a need to address student mental health, truancy and behavioral stability. In 2022, the need to address rising mental health challenges was named as a critical challenge.

Retention

While both retaining and recruiting were identified as priorities, the committee felt strongly that these two related issues should be considered separately, Russell said.

For years, retaining educators has been identified as a priority by the district and DAAC. In this year’s report, the advisory group recommended the district focus specifically on reducing workload and increasing support to aid with its retention efforts.

“In the last year, we’ve done a lot with professional development and increasing planning time, and the DAAC committee really wanted to make sure we emphasized that as well as increasing supports for teachers in the classroom,” Russell said of the first recommendation.

In increasing support, the committee pointed to needing better communication of benefits, making teachers feel valued and supported, exploring alternative work schedules with community partnerships, and potentially offering financial assistance with housing or cost-of-living through increased partnerships with local businesses.

Recruiting

Following national trends, Eagle County School District has faced significant challenges in recruiting educators in recent years. On Wednesday, during a recruiting update, Adele Wilson, the district’s chief human resources officer, said the district is “kind of in a crisis mode, not just for teachers and educators, but also for our support employees.”

“We have seen over the years, that the numbers have dwindled, we’ve heard about the educator shortage, we’ve heard about our struggles in the valley with housing, we’ve heard about the affordability,” Wilson said. “We have heard from every single principal when they’ve come and presented to us at the board meetings that staffing is an issue.”

Wilson reported that in August 2023 the district had 62 open positions — 35 certified and 27 support staff vacancies. With around 1,000 employees, this translates to a 6% vacancy rate. She added that as of April 2, the district had hired 24 individuals out of its total 80 vacant positions at the time, translating to a 5% vacancy rate.

“We’re making progress,” she said.

However, the challenge of recruiting remains. To assist with the challenge, the district has currently focused on ways to increase both the quality and quantity of applicants, Wilson said. This has included focusing on building relationships with educators in other countries, attending recruitment events, building pipelines for student teachers and more.

The district accountability committee suggested that the district also improve its communication as well as offer more competitive salaries — getting and staying in the top 10% of districts in the state — and have additional support for new hires.

Among its suggestions around communication was sharing alternative pathways for licensure with the community. 

“The DACC committee felt like there was a lot of interest in the community around people who might be seeking a second career option or a change in their career and they just don’t know the pathway for alternative licensure as a teacher or even as a support staff,” Russell said.

DAAC emphasized the importance of competitive salaries and things like housing stipends in hiring but also acknowledged the resource challenge to do so. Wilson also addressed the need for additional resources — including forming a recruitment team — in her presentation to the board.

“We didn’t pass our MLO (mill levy override) in November, I would support us going for another MLO to look to support salaries,” Wilson said. “We need some support because as we know Colorado and our funding is not nearly what we need to take care of our people.”