Turnover, shortages, calls for help

Each day, 18,000 students take their seats inside Hillsborough County’s most struggling schools, enough to fill a small city.

The county by far logged more schools with D or F grades than any other in Florida, according to state numbers released in December. In all, 33 elementary and middle schools.

The vast majority of students in those schools come from poor families, with stresses at home that can hamper their ability to learn.

They are kids who need the most from their school district. Yet they are more likely to be greeted in class by a substitute teacher, or one with far less experience than those at higher-performing schools, a Tampa Bay Times analysis found.

In an average week, they will witness more fights or acts of defiance or bullying. There’s a good chance they’ll see more turnover in their principal’s office. And the staff will suffer lower morale.

With each year, the problem grows more concentrated. State and district policies give families more freedom than ever to choose other schools, leaving poorer families behind. Hillsborough already is one of the state’s most-segregated districts by race and income.

Florida awarded its 2023 letter grades based on student scores alone because new state tests and standards meant there was no way to compare results with the prior year. Gone was the extra credit Florida schools normally get when students show improvement — a one-year hiccup that unmasked some hard truths for the nation’s seventh-largest school district.

The Times reviewed hundreds of pages of school district documents and school surveys. Reporters analyzed state and federal datasets, spoke to more than 20 educators and experts, and visited an F-graded school in Tampa for a closer look.

Almost half the children across D and F schools were woefully behind in reading, the Times analysis found.

Two Tampa schools had the lowest pass rates on reading in the state. One of them, Just Elementary, is now closed, with three more shutting down in June. Of the 20 worst-performing elementary schools on the reading test, almost half were in Hillsborough County.

Those and other numbers present a daunting challenge for the school board and new Superintendent Van Ayres, the district’s fourth top leader in nine years. A board majority, with prodding from Ayres, has approved a property tax referendum that could help by shoring up the teaching force. But some critics argue the district can’t be counted on to spend that money effectively.

Florida’s other school districts serve kids in poverty, too, some much larger than Hillsborough. They operate with the same big problems, the same rules for school grades.

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Yet it’s Hillsborough that struggles the most.

Palm Beach County came closest with 23 D and F schools. The state’s largest district, Miami-Dade, had five.

Eight of Florida’s 10 largest districts saw either a decrease in D and F schools or a small increase from the year before.

The number in Hillsborough more than doubled.

Short on experience

It takes four years for a teacher to become “experienced” under Florida guidelines, and Hillsborough as a whole has a larger share of those teachers than the state average.

But that’s not the case at the county’s D and F schools. A third of their teachers are inexperienced on average, nearly triple the rate at its A-graded schools.

Experience and formal training make a world of difference, said veteran teacher Christie Gold, who oversees college interns with the school district’s human resources department. New teachers must know about child development, teaching strategies and how to manage a full classroom.

When someone without a teaching background is assigned to a high-needs school, “it’s a steep hill to climb,” Gold said. “I don’t think it’s an ideal situation for someone who just woke up and said, ‘I really want to be a teacher.’”

At Monroe Middle Magnet, a D-graded school a few miles from MacDill Air Force Base, half of its 26 teachers had fewer than four years’ experience last year. About two-thirds were new to the school, according to payroll data.

Inexperience characterized the teaching ranks at D-graded Ippolito Elementary in Riverview. Administrators wrote in their annual report that the school’s low scores were “a direct result of a large percentage of teachers new to the profession, country, state and/or content.”

Six other schools described similar conditions.

In anonymous district surveys, teachers and parents also cited inexperience and turnover.

“We need more staff; we have many vacancies,” wrote a teacher at Adams Middle.

“The turnover of staff at this school is sad,” said a parent at Eisenhower Middle.

At Tampa’s Sheehy Elementary, three teachers in one grade left the district last year. The impact was severe at a school of just 347 students. Passing rates in that grade were 16% in reading and math.

Schoolwide, 20% of students passed in both subjects — among the lowest rates in Florida.

Steady teaching was hard to find in other grades, too. At one point, a vacancy forced Sheehy’s longtime principal, Delia Gadson-Yarbrough, to teach fifth grade English for several weeks.

Sheehy wound up with an F.