Howard County Public School System: Staff vacancies reduced ahead of school year
BALTIMORE -- The Howard County Public School System has reduced the number of its staff vacancies ahead of the incoming school year—showing a marked improvement when compared to the number of vacancies that existed around the same time last year, according to school officials.
At this point, there are 53 certified staff vacancies in the school district, resulting in a 99% fill rate, school officials said.
Last year, around the same time, the school district had 25% more vacancies, according to school officials.
The school district implemented several strategies to ensure that it was quickly filling vacancies ahead of the 2023-2024 school year, school officials said.
Some of these strategies the district used included contract options and job fairs:
- Offering over 350 open contracts to teachers wanting to teach in HCPSS. This is more than four times the number we were offering as little as five years ago.
- Holding three job fairs in June and July where staff provided support to candidates with application submission, credentialing, and determining if candidates met minimum qualifications. School administrators and programmatic leads were on site to interview candidates and several candidates were hired after coming to one of the fairs.
School officials noted that the district temporarily hired 10-month staff to assist its Office of Human Resources and ensure that all applications and recommendations to hire were quickly processed.
