Richland 1 offered $2K to returning teachers. It didn’t tell them until it was too late

In hopes of stemming the growing tide of teacher departures, Richland 1 board members in March approved a $2,000 retention bonus for teachers who return to their classrooms in the fall.

But there was just one problem. District officials didn’t tell teachers about the incentive.

As a result, the deadline for teachers to sign contracts for the upcoming school year passed last week without them being made aware of the retention bonus, defeating its purpose.

“We let the entire contract period go and we never emailed our teachers to say, ‘Hey, by the way, the board reallocated $7 million and you’re going to get $1,000 in June and $1,000 in September,’” board member Robert Lominack seethed at Tuesday’s meeting. “I don’t think you have to be a (human resources) expert to know that that seems to be one of the most basic communications we could have sent to our teachers.”

It’s not clear what impact, if any, the district’s failure to publicize the incentive will have on retention. Richland 1 would not disclose any information to the newspaper about the number of teachers who signed — or declined to sign — contracts by the deadline.

Lominack, a frequent critic of the district administration, said he fielded teacher inquiries about the incentive last week as the deadline approached. In one case, he said, a teacher had to spend part of her Friday tracking down information about the incentive as she weighed whether to sign on for another year.

“That does not seem to be the way we should demonstrate how much we appreciate our teachers and staff,” Lominack said.

Contract decisions come with high stakes for South Carolina educators, who by May 10 each year are required to commit to teaching the following year — oftentimes without knowing their salary or classroom assignment — and face license suspension if they later break their contract for any reason.

Last year, when Richland 1 offered teachers a similar retention incentive, Superintendent Craig Witherspoon notified employees on April 20, several weeks before the contract deadline.

When asked why teachers weren’t notified of the incentive prior to the contract deadline this year, Witherspoon chalked it up to the recent change in HR directors.

“We had some transition in the shop with Dr. Koumas coming in,” he said at Tuesday’s board meeting, referring to the district’s new human resources director John Koumas, who replaced former HR chief Jeff Long in mid-March.

District spokeswoman Karen York said Thursday that information about the retention incentives would be provided to all employees by the end of this week.

She characterized the timing as being “around the same time the information was sent to employees last year,” without acknowledging that last year’s notification occurred three weeks prior to the contract deadline and this year’s will occur a week after it.

York also asserted that the first installment of the retention bonus was not tied to signing a contract for next school year, but would instead be paid to any teacher employed by the district at the end of this school year.

That is inconsistent with the way the district handled retention bonuses last year, when only teachers who signed their contracts and pledged to return to the district received the incentive.

It also contradicts statements by Richland 1 chief financial officer Sherri Mathews-Hazel, who at Tuesday’s meeting said that employees would need to be on the district’s payroll in June to receive the first bonus installment. An employee would typically only be on the payroll in June if they signed a contract to work next year.

The district’s reinterpretation of the retention bonuses did not sit well with Lominack, who said it seemed like an attempt to skirt responsibility for the administration's mistake. He said while he supported bonuses for existing teachers, this particular allocation was not intended for that purpose.

“To call something a retention incentive obviously means you’re trying to get people to sign the contracts to retain them for the following year,” he said. “To now just switch that up is nuts. But what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to escape the criticism that by not telling teachers before contracts were due they completely nullified the whole point of this.”

Richland 1’s failure to inform employees about retention incentives is the latest example of the district’s inadequate response to its crushing teacher shortage, critics charge.

Since 2021, teacher vacancies in Richland 1 have more than quadrupled and the district’s teacher turnover rate has skyrocketed to 22.5%, higher than similarly sized districts in South Carolina, according to the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention and Advancement.

As a result, more students are winding up in classrooms without certified teachers and being asked to complete self-paced online courses with minimal guidance and support, parents told The State.

Lominack and Barbara Weston, both former Richland 1 teachers who now serve on the school board, have repeatedly asked the administration to act with greater urgency to address the district’s problems recruiting and retaining teachers.

“Our (administration’s) attitude is this is a nationwide problem, we don’t have anything to do with it, we can’t control it and it just is what it is,” Lominack said. “We’re just not changing our ways to try to make things better in tough circumstances.”

A good place to start, he said, would be to solicit input from teachers and act on their feedback. By not focusing on why teachers are leaving the district, Richland 1 has missed opportunities to curtail the exodus of educators, Lominack said.

“We have ignored issues at some of our schools that have created some really high turnover, and this has been going on for a number of years,” he said.

School leaders and the culture they foster play a major role in retention, Weston explained. And retention, in turn, impacts recruitment.

“If I am happy where I am, I encourage other people to join me,” said Weston, who once worked as a minority teacher recruitment specialist. “If I am not, when you’re looking for some place to go, I encourage you to go any place else.”

Despite warnings from board members and parents, Richland 1 officials have been loath to acknowledge the severity of the district’s recruitment and retention problems.

Felicia Richardson, Richland 1’s coordinator of recruitment and retention, said in an interview last month that the district’s situation was not unique.

“There are schools across our state and across our nation that are suffering from the same type of shortage that we have,” she said. “So we kind of have to put it in perspective.”

An analysis of district-level teacher vacancy data shows, however, that Richland 1’s shortage is particularly dire. The district started the school year with more vacancies than any district in South Carolina and more than twice as many vacancies per capita as any large district in the state.

While Richardson acknowledged there was room for improvement, Richland 1 appears likely to end the school year without a comprehensive plan to enhance teacher recruitment and retention.

Koumas, the district’s new HR director, said in an interview last month that he was focused on finding ways to keep teachers from leaving the district, but had yet to settle on any specific retention initiatives.