Staffing

Paragraph 46: District shall actively recruit bilingual staff and trained in working with ELLs for teaching positions.

The District shall actively recruit qualified, properly endorsed ESL and SEI staff for relevant teaching positions. In addition, the District shall actively recruit bilingual staff trained in working with ELLs, and staff with fluency in one or more of the languages of the District’s ELLs for relevant teaching and administrative positions, and in particular for positions as SPED teachers and aides.

Paragraph 47: Vacancies shall express interest in candidates with relevant certifications.

Toward that end, the District’s notices regarding employee vacancies shall express an interest in candidates with ESL, ELL, SEI, or bilingual credentials and language fluency in a language other than English.

Paragraph 48: ESL shall be provided by a teacher who is certified and qualified to teach ESL. To meet this requirement, the District shall use various methods and resources.

The District shall ensure that all ESL instruction is provided by a teacher who is certified in ESL and qualified to teach ESL. To meet this requirement, the District shall utilize the following methods or resources to recruit, hire, assign, retain, and/or train adequate numbers of ESL certified teachers for its ELLs, among others:

    1. The Boston Teacher Residency Program for individuals new to teaching;
    2. Boston Pathways for teachers with experience teaching but new to ESL;
    3. ESL professional development for ESL staff;
    4. ESL professional development for HILT teachers, as required by Paragraph 64;
    5. The District shall not offer “reasonable assurance” to any newly hired core content course instructor, following the first year of their employment, that they will be rehired in the forthcoming year, nor shall the District rehire any such teacher, unless they have made substantial progress toward completing training in Categories 1, 2, 3, and 4, or toward obtaining an ESL certification. A teacher shall be deemed to have made substantial progress toward completing training if s/he has completed in the first year of employment (i) at least Categories 2 and 4 or (ii) approximately half of the ESL certification requirements, and is committed to completing Category training or the ESL certification requirements prior to the end of the last month of his/her second year of employment. The District shall not rehire any such teacher for a third year of employment if s/he has not completed training in Categories 1 through 4 or obtained an ESL certification.
    6. The District shall require all non-tenured year one and year two core content teachers of ELLs to obtain an ESL certification or to complete the Category 1, 2, 3, and 4 training as a condition of tenure.