The United States is experiencing a teacher shortage crisis that is even more pronounced in rural communities. Teachers may be driven away from the profession if they feel inadequately trained or under-supported to address students' mental health needs. As such, an important teacher retention strategy is to ensure schools have enough mental health…

Principals are instrumental to successful school improvement efforts and positive student outcomes. However, recent workforce trends, increased accountability, demands of the job, and turnover rates for school principals are worrisome. Succession planning is a systematic approach that involves all aspects of identifying and retaining leaders…

During the fall of 2012, the Donnell-Kay Foundation surveyed the state's superintendents and charter network leaders to better understand the principalship in Colorado today. Some key findings of the survey are presented in this report. The findings include perceptions that there is a shortage of quality leaders to run Colorado's schools, that the…

This handbook provides public libraries with a source of hints, ideas, and suggestions to increase the diversity of their personnel in a non-discriminatory manner and with equality in personnel policies. The guide includes the following sections: (1) Why This Handbook?; (2) Getting Started; (3) Policy Statement--creating a policy, examples, and…

This document discusses various aspects of the training and utilization of "teacher aides" (used here to refer to the paraprofessional, lay assistant, nonprofessional, teacher helper, assistant teacher, or auxiliary personnel whose work may include "all those functions the non-certificated person might perform in the educational…