Broward County Public Schools is looking for more than a few good men and women.
The school district has about 1,200 job openings, everything from teachers to bus drivers to custodians, so an intensive recruitment drive is underway.
The first district-wide, all-positions job fair will be held at Western High School in Davie on February 26th. Job seekers need to sign up in advance on the district’s website.
"So there is a vast amount of positions that we currently have available, and that we are recruiting for,” said Susan Rockelman, the district’s director of talent acquisition.
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Claudia Fajardo went from teacher’s aide to teacher at Coral Park Elementary School in Coral Springs. That’s a path the district is encouraging its employees to take.
"I love the students, I love children and I’m doing it with all my passion, this is my passion,” Fajardo said.
Fajardo teaches special education, she has two aides in her classroom to help, but the overall teacher shortage creates challenges for every teacher still on the job. The district is looking to hire 240 teachers.
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"We need to be flexible, we need to be ready to go to cover, some days they’re sick or someone cannot come, we need to make accommodations, yes, it’s sad because we don’t have full staff, every day it’s less people and less teachers in the education system,” Fajardo said.
“We have seen an increase in teachers leaving the profession and probably the majority of them I believe are due to the Covid, going through that was very difficult for our teachers,” Rockelman explained.
She pointed out that applicants don’t need to have a degree in education to become a teacher.
“We have pathways for those individuals that have a passion for teaching, have a bachelors degree, we can give them the induction, the pedagogy to become a teacher and a lot of people don’t know that,” Rockelman said.
Kids can’t learn if they can’t get to school. The district has 1,200 buses in its fleet, but they’re short by 250 drivers, so every day there’s a juggling act that happens at the bus depot, trying to get all the buses to the schools where they need to go.
The district is training new bus drivers all the time, but they still need more.
“So the driver shortage has a huge impact, we’ve done some creative routing to ensure that students are picked up and transported to school but for instance, yesterday we had 98 drivers that were out on top of the fact that we had 250 vacancies, that caused severe delays,” said Dr. Simone Plowers, the transportation operations manager.
The job openings are in every facet of school district operations. You can serve children as a teacher’s aide, or serve them lunch in the cafeteria, or join the custodian corps and really mop up the recruitment drive.
