By Staff
Job fair to be held to attract teachers and administrators
By CLAUD HODGES
Senior Reporter
The Beaufort County Schools’ Minority Hiring Practices Committee hopes for favorable results at the school system’s job fair in May.
The committee was formed in the fall of 2007 by the Beaufort County Board of Education as part of an effort to hire more minority teachers and administrators for the school system.
The job fair will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. May 2 at Beaufort County Community College.
Vehicles for promoting the job fair include radio, television and newspaper advertising. Also, the job fair will be promoted on the Internet.
The job fair will offer on-site interviews to people interested in working for the school system, Cyrus said. Principals and teachers from each school in the school system will represent their schools at the job fair.
Cyrus told Harding that one administrator, a minority, had recently been hired to work at John Cotten Tayloe Elementary School.
Committee members talked about including signing bonuses as part of employment packages as a way to entice teachers to work for Beaufort County Schools. Signing bonuses are part of a set of recommendations the committee previously forwarded to the school board.
Robert Belcher, school board chairman and a former principal in the school system, said he believes that providing signing bonuses to incoming teachers would be frowned upon, if not opposed, by teachers already working for the school system because they are not getting higher salary supplements.
Eltha Booth, chairwoman of the committee and a school board member, and Harding brought up an idea to “grow” teachers within area communities and the school system. They suggested providing scholarships to prospective teachers, another one of the recommendations the committee previously sent to the school board.
Booth and Harding also suggested providing scholarships to teacher assistants within the school system to help them earn their teaching certificates.
Those two recommendations are expected to be discussed in the board’s upcoming budget meetings.
Carroll supports the idea of cultivating home-grown teachers.
Booth told committee members she will make every effort to send committee members’s suggestions to the school board.
After the meeting, Harding and Northern talked with each another about attendance at the meeting.
Committee members who did not attend the meeting were Joe Boston, Cynthia Heath, Glenora Jennette, Dianne Lee, William O’Pharrow and Leon Whitney.