Shutt, Napkori

Fishing in the fall

First Posted: 9/10/2014 WILKES-BARRE &#8212; Ronald Shivers stood up and made the same appeal he has given the Wilkes-Barre Area School Board periodically for years: What is being done to increase the number of minority teachers?
It&#8217;s an issue that has bedeviled the district for the last decade as the number of minority students has grown while the teaching staff remains overwhelmingly white. Shivers made the same case he and others have made before: Minority students benefit by &#8220;seeing people like themselves in positions of leadership.&#8221;
Every time the issue comes up, administrators have agreed there is need to recruit more minority teachers but then lament the failure of various efforts in the past.
This time Superintendent Bernard Prevuznak and Solicitor Ray Wendolowski rattled off a string of new initiatives launched after local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People leader Ron Felton pressed the issue yet again earlier this year.
&#8220;We had a round table discussion with all local colleges,&#8221; Wendolowski said, as well as contacts with other &#8220;historically black&#8221; colleges, to come up with ideas. He said district representatives will meet with the local NAACP today to discuss the matter.
The district also is looking to &#8220;put together a list of let&#8217;s call them billet families,&#8221; Wendolowski added, people who would let a student teacher from a college stay with them while they worked in the district and got to know the area. District officials have noted it is difficult to get minority student teachers to come to the area because they opt for other districts where minority teachers are already better established.
Prevuznak said the district is also thinking longer-term, hoping to get more of its own minority students to consider teaching as a career, on the theory they would want to stay in the area. &#8220;We&#8217;re looking to work with local college career days&#8221; to expose minority students to the option, Prevuznak said, and the district is &#8220;forming a future teachers club.&#8221;
Wilkes-Barre Area has:
&#8226; The largest black enrollment among Luzerne County school districts in 2013-14, 19.7 percent, according to state data.
&#8226; The second largest Hispanic enrollment, 25.3 percent. Hazleton Area had a larger Hispanic contingent at 42 percent but only 2.2 percent black enrollment. Wyoming Valley West had the second largest black enrollment at 8.2 percent.
&#8226; Four minority teachers and one minority administrator, according to Felton.
District-level data on teacher race is not readily available, but national data from 2012 suggests diversity hasn&#8217;t yet penetrated teaching ranks, with nearly 82 percent of teachers being white, 6.8 percent black and 7.8 percent Hispanic. National data for Pennsylvania lists the percentage of black teachers state wide at about 6 percent, even though blacks comprise almost 15 percent of enrollment.

W-B Area renews minority hiring efforts