Dear Team DPS:
This week, we had the wonderful opportunity to say to 900 educators: Welcome, and thank you for joining Team DPS!
I am thrilled that, despite a national teacher shortage, we are able to attract such a strong group to our district -- 60% of whom come to us with prior teaching experience. We know these teachers had many options, and we are grateful they chose DPS.
DPS has developed a strong national reputation as a place committed to the support and development of our teachers. Teaching is an extraordinarily complex and challenging profession, and it is vital that our teachers receive the same kind of quality coaching and support that professionals receive in other highly knowledge-intensive professions.
That is why we pair our new teachers with experienced educators in their buildings, who know their kids and families, through our Teacher Leadership & Collaboration (TLC) program. In TLC, teacher leaders work with teams of teachers to give them personalized coaching and provide for peer-to-peer team learning. When our teachers want to lead teams of teachers, TLC offers them opportunities to do so without leaving their classrooms.
I was deeply struck that many of these eager teachers I spoke to this week described a sense of mission that we share across the entire DPS team. While we know our country is going through lots of challenges, few have the opportunity that we as educators do to create a better, stronger, more just and more equitable community. There is no better time to be a teacher committed to making our country a better place!
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An educator checks in at the New Educator Institute event.
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It was also nice to see that many of our new teachers come to us through routes we have worked hard to establish to diversify our teaching force. These routes include opportunities to become teachers for our classroom assistants (our paraprofessionals), our tutors in the Denver Math Fellows program and career changers through our Denver Teacher Residency. Our current group of teachers new to DPS, though, is only slightly more diverse than last year's (28% teachers of color compared to 23% at this point last year), and continuing to strengthen the quality of recruiting of diverse teachers remains a high priority for us.
Finally, it is important to emphasize that, if we are going to attract talented professionals into teaching as a profession, we need to be able to pay them better, especially given the rising cost of housing in Denver. We commit to working with our partners in the state legislature to improve Colorado's current K-12 education funding, which is roughly $2,000 less per student than the national average.
Please join me in thanking our newest team members for choosing to make their contributions in Denver Public Schools.
Best,
Tom
