Huntsville City Schools has a teacher morale problem, and the evidence is that the district had the highest percentage of new hires in North Alabama, said Adam Keller, Alabama Education Association's Huntsville representative.

More than 20 percent of Huntsville City Schools teachers in 2014-15 had one year or less classroom experience, a recent report by Alabama School Connection showed. That put Huntsville in a three-way tie for the fifth highest percentage in Alabama and the highest of 15 surrounding school districts in Madison, Limestone, Morgan, Marshall and Jackson counties.

"That's a startling number," said Keller, who became AEA Uniserv director in June after teaching three years at Johnson and Grissom high schools. "If 20 percent of your teachers are new, that does indicate a retention problem.

"There is a trend that the more experienced teachers, and in many cases, the more well-thought-of teachers, were leaving the system," he said.

Since March, the board approved 108 resignations and 73 retirements from classroom personnel, personnel records show.

There are a myriad of reasons for teacher dissatisfaction, Keller said, but they mostly are all related to sweeping changes during the past four years since Dr. Casey Wardynski became superintendent in July 2011. The transitions have been simply more than many experienced teachers could take, he said.

But a morale problem doesn't just affect experienced teachers who left the district, because the perception that Huntsville is a bad place to work hurts the ability to recruit the best new teachers, Keller added.

"Most teachers I've talked to in North Alabama will say, 'Don't go to Huntsville. Go to Madison City or Madison County. You'll find more stability. You'll have less stress and more chance to be successful.'

"I'm not saying I agree with that, but that is what I hear regularly," Keller said.

Pay problem?

Wardynski agreed there have been dramatic changes in the district, not all by his doing, but he said Huntsville is successfully hiring "effective" teachers as opposed to just employing qualified teachers. He added that after talking with Keller, he believes the district with more than 1,500 teachers mostly has a pay problem, not a morale problem.

"I said, 'Well, if we paid more, would they be happy,' and he (Keller) said, yeah. So we have a pay issue, not a morale issue," Wardynski said, noting Huntsville teachers have not had a significant pay increase since 2008.

A couple months before Wardynski was hired, the school board adopted the minimum state teacher salary schedule as proposed by Ed Richardson, former state school board president. The school board had hired him as a consultant to help it get out from a nearly $20 million debt. Richardson said reducing the salary schedule for new teachers meant fewer teachers would be laid off during a year that saw pink slips given to 420 district employees.

Mary Ruth Yates, a former assistant superintendent and longtime Huntsville educator (twice interim superintendent), had advised the board that reducing the pay schedule will hurt the district's ability to recruit quality teachers.

"The bedrock of any school system is the teachers," Yates said in 2011. "If we want the brightest and best, we have to be competitive."

Yates added, "It was a plum to be hired by and work for Huntsville City Schools."

Huntsville School Board President Laurie McCaulley, who was on the board in April 2011 when it reset the salary schedule, said there is a "desire" to raise teacher salaries, but the district can't afford to yet.

While the district's ledgers are in the black now, she said the cost of implementing the consent decree to end the decades old desegregation order will cost around $19 million. Additionally, while the state helps pay teacher salaries, Huntsville has 200 positions, such as pre-kindergarten teachers, that it pays for solely by itself.

Keller believes pay is one of the issues affecting teacher morale.

"I saw Grissom teachers looking at transferring, looking at Arab," he said. I heard some say 'I'm going to go out to Madison County because they pay a little more.'"

Five Grissom teachers resigned in July, personnel records show.

Does experience matter?

When experienced teachers leave for other districts and they are replaced with new teachers fresh out of college, the classrooms can suffer, Keller said.

"I was a young, inexperienced teacher. I know for a fact, it's hard. When you're in your first year, you're not going to be a great teacher. There might be some exceptions," he said.

Alabama School Board Member Mary Scott Hunter said experienced teachers generally are better than inexperienced ones, but young teachers often compensate for experience with energy, drive and ability to work extra hours enthusiastically.

"You want to have the sage teachers, but that teacher also doesn't always bring the excitement to try new techniques," she said.

The rapid implementation of digital learning tools, such as Huntsville City Schools going totally digital with no paper textbooks three years ago, is something that appeals more to young teachers and less to long time teachers, Hunter added.

Daunting digital transition

Keller said for many teachers, the 1:1 Digital Initiative, which did away with physical textbooks and put computers in the hands of every student, "was the straw the broke the camel's back" when included with other changes.

Wardynski was asked whether the 1:1 Digital Initiative was a key factor in causing teachers to leave. He said "it's hard to disentangle" the multiple transitions occurring in the district in recent years.

Since reducing the salary schedule in 2011, the district:

Has hired new superintendent;

Elected three new board members;

Had to implement new College and Career Ready Standards (Common Core);

Put more emphasis on math/technology, such as Math Acceleration program;

Added more student testing to monitor progress;

Launched the Digital 1:1 Initiative;

Centralized hiring practices;

Eliminated the policy that allowed tenured teachers first dibs on vacancies at stronger schools;

Adopted zoning changes, as part of consent decree, which meant some teachers could no longer bring their children to schools where they taught.

Many teachers took incentives to retire early, Wardynski said, and "if you have lumpy hiring in the past, you'll have lumpy retention in the future."

The district also intentionally hired more teachers than it needed last year to have some on standby as replacements should any teacher have to leave during the school year, the superintendent said. That came out of an experience the previous year at Butler High School where a departed teacher was replaced with multiple substitutes, he added.

The five-year look

Looking at hiring trends from one year isn't a fair assessment, Wardynski said, because it's such a short snapshot. The district will hire half as many teachers this year as last year, which will result in about 6 percent new teachers, he added.

A more fair survey is to look at the percentage of teachers with more than five years experience, Wardynski said, because that's when teacher growth begins to plateau. The number of Huntsville teachers with more than five years tenure (70 percent) compares favorably with Madison and Vestavia city school districts, he said.

The new teachers Huntsville is hiring have gone through a "pretty robust screening process," the district implement a couple years ago that that uses a talent management group at the central office instead of leaving it up to school principals, he said.

"We get a lot of candidates. We hire very few," Wardynski said. "We have much better number on retention rates, since we implemented the new process than we did before."

Attracting new teachers

Hunter said there are teacher morale issues in Huntsville, but there also are experienced teachers who love their superintendent, and the district still attracts excellent new teachers.

"I hear teachers say, 'Man. I would really like to work there, in an environment where teachers are encouraged to be excellent,'" she said. "You hear the rumors that's it's very locked down, but it's really the opposite.

"I had one young woman who just graduated from Athens State who wants to work for the great Casey Wardynski," Hunter said.

McCaulley said Huntsville's morale problem is really a communication problem.

"I think there's a lot of misinformation," she said. "Because once you sit down with them (teachers), and they ask you these questions and you clarify them, they say 'Ah, that's not what we were told.' It's not like they think it is, but perception is reality, and it's our job as a board to get out there and make them see we have their best interest at heart."

It helps to attend faculty meetings but sometimes she must meet teachers privately, even away from campus, McCaulley said, and giving teachers one-on-one access with their board can bring a comfort.

"It's about relationships," McCaulley said. "And the board has to have relationships with its employees."