Teacher (Dis)Satisfaction in RPS
Digging into the data after 48 teachers leave Holton Elementary in 4 years.
By Jeannie Bowker
At the November 21 RPS school board meeting, public comment revealed a troubling array of issues in RPS, issues that should concern all of us. One parent spoke of strip searches at a middle school and another of issues with the unimpeded access to Chromebooks in high school. A middle school parent discussed violations related to the individual education plan (IEP) for a child, and a high school parent pleaded for help with the death threats a child received (unfortunately, this is a common occurrence in high schools in RPS right now). And a group of Holton community members, myself included, discussed the abysmal teacher satisfaction rates at Linwood Holton Elementary School (“Holton”) as well as the high number of teachers and staff leaving Holton, asking for a concrete plan to address the problems at Holton and across RPS.
On October 17, 2022, the RPS Administration shared results from its Teacher Retention and Teacher Satisfaction surveys for the 2021–2022 school year. As displayed below in a chart tallying up responses to questions relating to teacher support from school administrators, Holton has the lowest satisfaction among elementary schools in RPS.
While the exceedingly low numbers are a gut punch to anyone in the Holton community (or any school with similarly low numbers), these numbers line up with years of teacher and staff departures at Holton. In a crowd-sourced list, Holton community members identified 48 teachers and staff — many of whom had taught and worked at the school for years — that have left the school since the 2018–2019 school year. Just this year from mid-August to mid-November, four teachers have left the school, causing uncertainty and change for students who have already been called upon to be more resilient than they should be since the pandemic. To be clear, there is abundant research demonstrating the value of teacher retention and satisfaction on student outcomes in a school.
Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the Virginia Department of Education, we also know that Holton’s 2021–2022 teacher retention rate (75%) is slightly lower than the district average (77.7%), and much lower than the district’s goal for teacher retention for the year (83%).
It is thanks to teacher advocacy that teacher retention and teacher satisfaction were included as part of Dreams4RPS, the five-year strategic plan for RPS. And because these elements are a part of Dreams4RPS, the RPS Administration must track and present data on teacher retention and satisfaction to the public and to the School Board.
But what happens after this data, and the attendant issues they encompass, are presented to the public? We have proof now of what has been anecdotally known at Holton: that since 2018, teachers and staff are leaving the school in droves due to issues with the school administration that remain unaddressed. Holton, again, anecdotally, used to be a school where teachers worked for years — decades — with little turnover. It was allegedly a crown jewel where teachers sought to be hired, and few spots opened up annually. Regardless of what Holton was, the numbers show it is not that now, and the Holton community is trying to help shape what the school can become. If teachers cannot speak for themselves due to fear of retribution at the school and in RPS, then the Holton community must try to do so.
It is baffling that the RPS Administration has not established and followed-through with clear plans with precise metrics and benchmarks for intervention when a school misses certain standards with its teacher satisfaction and teacher retention numbers. The fact that they have not done this even for the district’s lowest performing school in terms of teacher satisfaction speaks volumes. What is the point of informing the public of schools where teachers and students face instability from teacher departures due to an unsupportive administration if there is no plan to remedy these issues? As the data shows, Holton is not the only school that needs an actionable plan to immediately fix teacher retention and stability as soon as possible.
The Board should join parents in demanding concrete responses to these concerns — and the many concerns that are present in RPS at the moment, from teacher satisfaction to retention to sufficient staff present in middle and high school to the bare basics of safety and operations. And the Administration should give it. Failure to do so risks indifference at best, and complicity at worst. Neither is acceptable.
