Higley district surveys former teachers to learn what it can improve

We’re always gratified to see the positive effects of school choice and the competition that results, and the Tribune reported on a prime example of that last week.

The Higley Unified School District is sending surveys out to teachers who left the district at the end of the last school year to find out why they left and whether anything could have been done to keep them onboard.

The district had a 25 percent teacher turnover rate, the Tribune’s Hayley Ringle reported Friday. Nationally, about 20 percent of teachers leave the school they’ve been working at each year, according to research cited on the Arizona Education Association’s Web site (www.arizonaea.org).

Higley assistant superintendent of human resources Denise Birdwell told Ringle, “We will look at their reasons for leaving and will create an analysis. We will report the data back to the (governing) board, and this will be a data point that we will use in our recruitment process.”

This may not sound like an exciting process, but it’s a necessary process, one that happens in business all the time as owners and investors study their market and how best to serve them. In this case, the market would be the students who are better served by experienced instructors who also are familiar with the district, its curriculum and its goals.

The Higley district can be lauded for asking specific questions about whether teachers left for reasons beyond their control, versus being dissatisfied with the profession as a whole or their workplace in particular.

We’d hope and expect most ex-Higley employees will still care more than enough about the students they left behind to answer a few questions about why they left.

We obviously don’t know what the response is going to be; it could be the teachers working in this growing, transient part of the East Valley are somewhat transient themselves and were simply unable to stay with the school they were at. It could be that more flexible options for continuing education would do the trick.

But we’re happy the dialogue has begun.