News

January 30

Pittston Area alters its hiring

School board looks to a new policy to end nepotism and to stress qualifications.

By Sherry Long slong@timesleader.com
Staff Writer

YATESVILLE – Rumors of people getting hired by the Pittston Area School District due to nepotism is legendary.

School board members are now working to dispel that image as the board voted 9 to 0 during its January meeting to approve the updated hiring policy. It is effective immediately.

“The intent is to hire the most qualified candidates regardless of who they know or might be related to,” board member Bob Linskey said.

He is certain that in the past, people had been hired based primarily on who they knew at the district.

Linskey and fellow board member Marilyn Starna worked together to write amendments to the policy, last revised in May 1996. They reviewed Scranton School District’s hiring policy to help craft this newest version. Linskey’s and Starna’s policy version has been discussed extensively by all board members since last fall, revising the protocol as other board members offered their own revisions.

The policy states that a “professional employees selection committee” will interview all applicants and grade them on the policy criteria.

The committee will consist of the superintendent, appropriate building principal, appropriate department chair or their designees and one school board member. School board members will serve on the committee in two month intervals.

All teaching candidates will receive numerical scores based on their college grade point average, knowledge of subject matter, job related experience, oral communication skills, confidence and whether they are a district area resident.

Candidates will also receive a certain number of points based on the test scores from the Praxis exam, state-mandated exam for teaching candidates. The total number of points a candidate in this division can receive is 325.

The top three candidates will also be graded on a basis ranging from 70 to 100 on how well they teach a class during a classroom presentation to the committee. That grade will be added to their overall points for a potential of 425 points.

Those three candidates will then be presented to the school board to vote on which candidate should be hired.

“This policy forces the selection committee to rank them on both objective and selective criteria and provide every candidate’s score to the board. So we can see why the selection committee said this is the top three,” Linskey said.

The revised hiring policy applies to all candidates whether they are applying teaching elementary, middle or high school students.

Board member Tony Guariglia said the district has had a hiring policy, yet this policy is detailed enough to make sure all board members are looking at the same criteria when choosing a candidate.

“We always felt we took the most qualified. This is the nice way we can all agree on an employee. I think this is going to be a fair way to categorize and get you comfortable with an individual teaching our kids,” Guariglia said.

Linskey also plans to ask the district’s administrative staff to develop similar policies requiring candidates for other employment positions in the maintenance, support staff and secretarial departments to be graded to select the best candidate.

Hazleton Area School District also has a similar teacher hiring policy in which the district grades each candidate on various portions throughout the interview process.

“It is fair. By rights you should take the name off, just put a number there and say this is the best candidate based on a, b, c and d,” Hazleton Superintendent Samuel Marolo said

Hazleton Area is considering taking its policy a step further by requiring prospective teaching candidates to develop and submit a lesson plan as part of the interview process, Marolo said.

Hazleton hopes to have the more stringent policy effective sometime in March.

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