Continued Frustration

This is a letter that I just received from the NYC Department of Education, Office of Teacher Recruitment.

Dear Kevin Boerem,

As you may have heard, Chancellor Joel Klein announced yesterday that there will be new guidelines that principals must follow when hiring teachers for the 2009-2010 school year. Specifically, due to uncertain economic times and reduced budgets, schools have been restricted to filling vacancies through the internal transfer process, meaning they can only consider current NYC DOE teachers who apply to change schools or who have been placed in excess. Later in the summer, this hiring restriction may be lifted if we find there is a lack of internal candidates available in a subject or geographic area.

Please note that there are some immediate exceptions to these hiring guidelines.
- New schools opening this fall as well as new schools first opening in 2007 or 2008. Those new schools may hire external candidates for up to half of their vacancies.
- External hires may be considered for vacancies in Speech and in Bilingual Special Education. (External candidates may also be considered for the following non-teaching positions: bilingual pupil personnel services, occupational therapist, and physical therapist.)

We can imagine that many of you are wondering what this announcement means for you as a new applicant to the New York City public schools. We think the key takeaways for you are the following:
- There will be considerably less hiring of new candidates this year and it will be extremely competitive. In recent years, only one out of four traditionally certified applicants have been hired. This year, we have almost twice as many applications and anticipate less than half the vacancies as last year.
- Any hiring that does happen will likely occur in August and possibly into the start of the school year.
- The new hire opportunities are most likely to be for shortage subject areas and high need geographic areas. While this is the case every hiring season, it will be especially be true for the 2009-2010 school year.

We admitted you to the New Teacher Finder because we believe that you have demonstrated potential to be a great teacher, and because you applied early, you have an advantage over other candidates. To that end, we hope that you continue to work with us while the schools determine their needs for new teachers. We will continue to offer webinars and chats on various topics that interest you as a new teacher, and schools will be allowed to post Requests for Applications in the New Teacher Finder. You are also welcome to use our resources on http://teachnyc.net and http://schools.nyc.gov to research our schools and send principals your resume in the event they have openings later in the summer. If you choose to send your materials to principals, please make sure you are only sending materials directly to the schools that you have researched and where you are truly most interested; blanketing schools with your resume would not be an effective strategy.

We hope that you stay committed to working with New York City students, but if you choose to stop pursuing employment with us for next school year, you can remove yourself from the New Teacher Finder by updating your employment preferences on your application to indicate that you DO NOT want help with your job search. This means that you will not receive any additional emails from us.

Our goal is to ensure that every student in our schools has a high-quality, certified teacher in place for September 2009, regardless of the budget situation. We have recruited a great number of you because we want to be able to offer schools with vacancies the best candidates possible. We wish you the best of luck during this challenging time.

Sincerely,
Office of Teacher Recruitment and Quality

As a result, the one interview I had, is now canceled. Awesome. Anyone looking to hire someone with sales experience?