Some new kinds of teaching jobs with four CMS schools in west Charlotte have attracted a lot of interest. The jobs are a blend of mentoring and teaching and they come with a big salary bump.
More than 700 applications have come in for just 26 spots at a few schools affiliated with Project LIFT. No wonder. They pay anywhere from an extra $4,600 to $23,000 a year. It’s part of the effort to boost learning at these schools.
Dan Swartz heads Project LIFT’s human resources department. He says the teachers will be responsible for several classes of students.
“That is a very heavy responsibility and we feel that it’s a very valuable one to be able to achieve high student outcome results and to develop other teachers to become excellent teachers,” says Swartz.
Project LIFT has been working with an education consulting firm based in Chapel Hill called Public Impact, to design the positions. The firm’s director Bryan Hassel says the idea is to spread the influence of the best teachers throughout the school.
“Most schools are organized one teacher, one classroom. Each teacher is responsible for a certain number of students. There’s not a lot of collaboration. There’s not a lot of teamwork,” says Hassel.
In this set up, the new elementary teachers will only teach their best subject and move between different classes. In addition, there will be other teachers called multi-classroom leaders. They’ll be in charge of several classes, developing lesson plans, and helping inexperienced and struggling teachers. These jobs have the highest salary.
The new jobs will be at Allenbrook Elementary, Ranson Middle, Ashley Park and Thomasboro Prek-8s. They aren’t expected to cost the district extra money because, in theory, the schools won’t have to hire as many facilitators.
