The Gilpin County Board of Education heard from a parent pleading for better teacher support in light of high teacher turnover rate over the past few years during their meeting on Tuesday, April 4, 2023.

During the public participation section of the meeting, parent Rebekah Babin, a mother of three kids currently enrolled at Gilpin County School, shared her growing frustration with high teacher turnover at the school. She began by expressing how impressed she was with the school when she first enrolled her kids at Gilpin School, praising the admission process, Elementary Principal Heather Huntoon, and the teachers.

She enrolled two of her children in preschool at Gilpin but by the end of the year, the teacher had quit. When Covid-19 happened, leaving everyone scrambling as it was, Babin says the replacement teacher quit after half a year with Gilpin School. Now that her third youngest is enrolled in preschool at Gilpin School, Babin said she feels that her child is not receiving the same level of care that her other children received previously. She watched more teachers “disappear” over the past year further disrupting her children’s education.

“As I have a child entering first grade…fourth and fifth grade,” Babin said, “I just don’t feel secure continuing my child’s education here, and [that hurts my heart].” Her voice was choked as she told the Board that she was “running out of reasons” to keep her kids enrolled when schools in bigger districts like Boulder Valley offer better teacher retention. Babin called on the Board to put forward “specific plans” to help support the staff and reduce turnover in the future. She called specifically for the administration to allocate more resources to support teachers. “You need to fight for them,” she told the Board, “You need to listen to your teachers.”

The Board discussed Babin’s plea, largely seeming to agree that the root of the issues facing her kids was a result of the teacher shortage that has been facing the nation for the past few years. The school is actively advertising positions, but with salaries struggling to keep up with the cost of living, as previously reported by The Mountain-Ear, it’s hard to attract candidates. This is a fact emphasized by Board President Bill Marr and Superintendent Dr. David Mackenzie.

Vice President Sarah Swanson also said that she thought that the lack of educators might have to do with the gun violence in America. She said that the generation entering the workforce today grew up participating in active shooter drills and reading news story after news story about teachers dying as a result of gun violence and she thinks that is discouraging potential teachers. There were two school shootings in March, one in Denver that injured two school administrators and one which resulted in the death of three adults and three children. Gilpin County School itself underwent two lockdowns in the past school year due to threats of violence, both of which did not come to fruition. In America today, not only is being a teacher an underpaid and underappreciated job, but it’s also a potentially deadly one.

There are no statistics on if there is a direct correlation between gun violence and the teacher shortage the United States faces. Still, stress was one of the main driving factors cited in 2022 by the Economic Policy Institute on the teacher shortage. That, and the fact that teachers’ compensation is not keeping up with inflation. In fact, teachers’ pay has fallen relative to other college graduates according to the study titled “The pandemic has exacerbated a long-standing national shortage of teachers.”

Board member Kristen Goddlet asked the Board what they could do to encourage and help teachers to stay, short of forcing legislatures to write new school funding or gun laws. But with static revenue restricting salaries and no groundbreaking gun control legislation on the horizon, the School Board ended the meeting without putting any new ideas forward.

During the meeting, the Board heard a report on a recent school-sponsored trip to Ireland. The 10-day trip offered participation to explore Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, and even the iconic Lochness over the school’s spring break. The Board also celebrated the fact that the school’s new bleachers are completed pending a ramp installment. They briefly discussed a refrigerator failure on March 18 which resulted in the loss of some stored food items.

The Gilpin County School Board of Education meets bi-monthly on the first and third Tuesdays of the month. Board meetings are held in the Gilpin County School Board Room at 7 p.m. and are open to the public.