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BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Even after holding two teacher job fairs in recent days, including one in Pittsburgh, the East Baton Rouge Parish school system still has roughly 50 vacant teaching positions nearly two weeks into the 2014-15 school year.
Even so, Millie Williams, executive director for human resources, told the School Board on Thursday she plans to stop hiring soon.
"We are putting a halt on hiring until next week until we do some shifting, which I know we will have to do," she said.
Williams tells The Advocate (http://bit.ly/VHHxKt) a few schools are overstaffed because of less-than-anticipated enrollment, so teachers are likely to be moved from those schools to fill vacancies at other schools.
Williams pronounced the Pittsburgh fair held last Saturday as a success, saying the school system has contracts with 18 teachers who attended the event.
"We met quite a few certified and qualified teachers and they were very interested in coming to East Baton Rouge Parish," Williams said.
Finding enough certified teachers for East Baton Rouge Parish schools, however, remains a moving target, and vacancies continue to pop up. Williams said that on Aug. 13, two days after the start of the school year, she had more than 60 teaching vacancies. Two days later, she had 101.
The August list of personnel changes, released earlier this week, shows a lot of teacher movement compared to mid-July. The list shows 125 teachers and instructional personnel resigned or retired, 236 were newly hired and 48 were reassigned from other jobs in the school system.
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Information from: The Advocate, http://theadvocate.com
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