CERRA, Winthrop University Launch Revamped S.C. Teacher Application
ROCK HILL— Applying to be a teacher in South Carolina just got easier thanks to a collaborative effort by the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement (CERRA), the State Department of Education, the South Carolina Association of School Personnel Administrators (SCASPA), and Winthrop University.
An effort to merge the Online Teacher Application and the Department of Education Certification Application has been completed and the result will streamline the process a teacher candidate experiences en route to teaching in South Carolina. Monday, March 17, marks the beginning of a new era as the revised South Carolina Educator Employment and Certification Application System is launched. The new system will allow teacher candidates to apply for certification and for a job through a single application. In addition to the merger, the system, which was designed by James Hammond, Associate Vice-President for Information Technology at Winthrop University and Charlie Maner, a former information specialist at Winthrop, has been redesigned and features a new site that combines better workflow with new user-friendly attributes.
“(Creating the dual application) is something we started working on in my first year at the State Department of Education,” said Dr. Janice Poda, Deputy Superintendent for Administration and former Executive Director at CERRA. “I knew we needed to combine the two applications and we’re glad it’s finally going to take off. It’s going to be a one stop shop for anyone that wants to teach in South Carolina. The ability to apply for a job and for certification on a joint application will eliminate some confusion that existed previously.”
The genesis of the project is rooted in an effort to increase the efficiency of jobseekers attending the South Carolina Expo for Teacher Recruitment, the only statewide teacher job fair in the state held annually by CERRA and the SCASPA. Dr. Poda says jobseekers would attend the fair and collect stacks of applications for different districts and spend hours completing them rather spending time with districts’ recruiters on site. She knew something had to be done and arranged meetings with personnel directors and eventually a unified paper application to be used by all districts was created. The next logical step was to move the application online and make it more accessible for teachers around the country to apply for a job, and now certification, online while monitoring their status.
Randy Vaughn, Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources in Greenwood School District 50 and co-developer of the project, says the true success story is the collaborative effort by all agencies involved to create a cost-effective solution to increase applications available to school districts across the state through an online tool. He admits that few people believed the initial phase of the project could be completed when the agencies first gathered in the summer of 1999; but after the passionate group released the initial phase of the application several months later in October he, along with the others on the committee, knew the countless hours spent working on the project to create a tool that had the possibility of dramatically changing the way teachers were hired was well worth it.
“It was an ambitious goal, but the group had renewed hope and faith in its advisors (Hammond and Maner) who soon proved that their work matched their words. Through perseverance, collaboration and utilization of available resources, the committee began to realize what we could accomplish,” he said.
Since its launch on October 1, 1999, nearly 100,000 teacher candidates have applied for positions in one of the state’s 85 school districts. The free application is unique in that a teacher candidate is able to apply to all teaching vacancies in the state with one application, and beginning Monday, March 17, will complete the teacher certification application simultaneously. Applicants are able to specify up to five districts or regions in which they wish to work or are able to select the statewide application option. The application was met with reluctance from several districts due to the need to learn new technology, but beginning with the 2007-2008 school year all 85 districts were onboard in addition to the South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind, South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice and the South Carolina Governors School.
The application is accessible online at www.winthrop.edu/scteach. Applicants with questions related to teacher certification should be addressed to the certification office at the Division of Educator Quality and Leadership at 803-734-8466; and questions concerning the application for employment should be directed to CERRA at 800-476-2387.
The agencies involved with the project know the application isn’t the single answer to solve teacher shortages problems in South Carolina, but as Vaughn said in an August 16, 2001, article, “It has already opened our window to the outside world…It provides information in a quicker format, and it gives many more people the opportunity to explore employment possibilities in our districts, rural and urban.”
School district human resource and personnel professionals agree. There is no cost to districts to retrieve information on applicants; the information can be accessed and downloaded on a daily basis. Theoretically, an individual can submit an online application, and that application can be received in a personnel office, forwarded to a principal’s desk and printed in less than one minute.
Dr. Gayle Sawyer, Executive Director of CERRA, was the director of personnel for the Darlington County School District when the application was launched for the first time in 1999. She remembers, “We thought we’d died and gone to heaven! We no longer had to print our own local application; we had searchable, consistent, immediate information on all applicants interested in our district, and educators providing references could complete one form for each applicant rather than one form for each district to which the applicant was applying.” She went on to say South Carolina was one of the first states in the country to provide this service to applicants. “Out out-of-state applicants frequently complimented our state on this innovation. Creating the dual employment and certification application was the next logical innovation.”
Other states have followed suit and have online employment applications, but Dr. Poda believes South Carolina is the only state to offer a dual application and hopes it will encourage more people to look at teaching in the Palmetto State. She is thrilled and very appreciative of the efforts of the collaboration of agencies that have kept her dream alive. “Seeing it come to fruition is a great sense to know something good for the future of teaching in South Carolina has been accomplished,” she added.
A third phase of the online application system is currently being studied by a subcommittee that will make recommendations concerning a platform to employ a more user-friendly interface, thus making analysis, reporting and transfer of the data even easier. In addition, the subcommittee is studying ways to integrate the data to district programs more easily and to assist districts with criminal history checks.
CERRA, an independent state agency located on the campus of Winthrop University, is the oldest and most established teacher recruitment program in the country. The purpose of CERRA is to provide leadership in identifying, attracting, placing and retaining well-qualified individuals for the teaching profession in South Carolina. CERRA’s programs have been adopted at school, district and state levels in more than 30 states in the United States.