MFISD confronts turnover with new hires, internal shuffle

By Emily Hilley-Sierzchula

Change can be both stressful and exciting for school districts. Either way, Marble Falls Independent School District students are seeing many new faces in classrooms and around campuses.

For the 2014-2015 school term, district administration hired 87 staff members, including 64 certified personnel (teachers, nurses and counselors,) said Wade Stanford, assistant superintendent of administrative operations, on Wednesday, Aug. 27.

“Teachers are super-excited,” he said. “Three days into school you can feel the excitement in the classrooms.”

Stanford explained that although there is some growth in the district, especially at the elementary school level, the new hires are replacements. “We have to qualify that, though: When a position comes open, we evaluate the need for that position.” If, for example, a math teacher left but the district has more need in special education, the district will hire a special education teacher. “In reality, we didn’t add any positions,” he said. Instead, employees shuffled among grade levels in some cases to meet students’ needs.

No budget adjustments or increases are needed to pay for the new hires, Stanford said. “There are just small fluctuations like what happens with differences in experience level, such as if a tenured teacher is replaced” with a teacher with less experience, and therefore less pay, he explained.

Although he said he has not looked at numbers, Stanford said the elementary-level growth is “not astronomical. We try to cap our student-teacher ratio at 22:1.”

Stanford delineated several factors in district turnover.