Teaching in St. Louis (home, job market, school district)

[Texan2008]

As someone who lived in the St.Louis area for 40 plus years and have lived in the Dallas area for the last 3, what is the teaching job market like in St. Louis right now? The Dallas Metroplex has a great deal of districts paying teachers to resign and quit due to state budget cuts. I am thinking of moving back to St.Louis if there is a better chance of getting a public school teaching job.

[marigolds6]

Well, there is a law working its way through the Missouri Legislature right now that will eliminate all tenure and will require every district to rank all of their teachers and place the bottom 1/3rd on probation any year. Any teacher on probation automatically makes the district minimum and must be fired if they are on probation the next year. It will go into effect with the start of the 2012 school year.
This should prompt a pretty big wave of retirements (since getting dropped to district minimum salary would be a big pension hit). So, I suspect there will be a lot of open positions soon.

[billiken]

You sound pretty certain that bill will actually make it out of committee. Sounds pretty absurd to me, but you never know in Missouri...

I would replace "will" with "could"

[aragx6]

Like most places it depends what you're teaching. Social studies, English, anything in the arts, PE, and librarian jobs are going to be the toughest to find, but if you're a science or math teacher you'll be good to go.

[marigolds6]

Arts have actually been pretty wide open too. There has been an ongoing shortage of fine arts teachers (especially music). A lot of people teaching on emergency credentials.

[zac100]

>will eliminate all tenure and will require every district to rank all of their teachers and place the bottom 1/3rd on probation any year.

Wow...is this truly what the bill says? So, this guarantees that every school district will have 33% of their faculty on probation every year. I'll be anxious to see the criteria used for ranking...how does one decide whether a high school physics teacher is a "better" teacher than a middle school home ec teacher, an elementary music teacher, a high school "gifted" teacher, or a middle school gym teacher. Or even two math teachers in the same high school, one of whom teaches mostly college prep/AP students, and the other who teaches lower-level students...

[dtha]

Special School District hasn't hired teachers for the last two years- the worse I have ever seen in ten years - they contract all county special ed teachers.