By Teresa Stepzinski 

“I want the district to find a way to get the balance between new and seasoned teachers in the schools,” Burney said. “Our successful schools have a steady progression of teachers, and they don’t seem to have the turnover that our challenged schools do.”

The district offers salary incentives to attract and retain experienced teachers at the poor-performing schools, but Burney said that might not be enough.

Teachers can receive a $5,000 signing bonus at schools receiving federal School Improvement Grants.

Some seasoned teachers, Burney said, might be “gun shy” about working in a poor-performing school because of negative public perception propagated by the news media.

“And it’s more work to teach in a challenged school,” Burney said.

But that hard work can have big benefits, she said.

“I think the No. 1 thing we need to do is to provide teachers with the notion that they have the opportunity to truly show how well they really can teach by working at a challenged school,” Burney

said.

In February, an Education Resource Strategies report showed that, district-wide, Duval County’s percentage of novice teachers in elementary schools is comparable to other school districts. Duval’s novice elementary teachers, however, are more concentrated in “high-poverty schools” than the other school systems studied, according to the report. Less effective teachers are clustered in the highest-needs elementary schools in Duval County, the report showed.

Last week, the board — in a 5-2 vote, with Burney and board member Paula Wright dissenting — approved a contract partnering with Teach for America to hire at least 296 “high-quality teachers” over a three-year period.

Teach for America is a program that puts people with college degrees in fields other than education through a teaching crash course. Once through the program, they are asked to work for two years in schools that serve predominantly low-income students.

Since 2008, the program has partnered with the district to bring in about 50 new teachers annually to teach in low-income schools in Jacksonville.

Before the vote, representatives of Friends of Northwest Jacksonville Schools repeated concerns that too many new teachers are being sent to low-performing schools, where students need more experienced educators. The group is composed of parents, students, community members and alumni of that area’s schools

On Friday, group member Earl Kitchings Jr. said it “makes no sense to continue to put first- and second-year teachers in the more challenged schools.”

“If your child was gravely ill, would you want a first-year medical student diagnosing and treating him, or would you want an experienced doctor

taking care of your child?” Kitchings said.

Kitchings also said it’s likely a new teacher will leave a low-performing school within a few months, which disrupts the continuity of the learning process and can be costly to the school system to find a replacement.

The district, he said, should work on recruiting seasoned teachers who can relate to children from diverse cultures and economically challenged backgrounds, which would reduce such turnover.

Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2011-11-07/story/duval-school-bo...