Imagine you’re a veteran teacher, happily on staff at a Montgomery County public elementary school.
Then you get the news: Enrollment is projected to change for next year and you are no longer needed at your school. You’ve become what’s known as an involuntary transfer—you still have a job with MCPS, but you need to go out and find another school to hire you.
“When you have a system this large, employees have to realize that they have a job with MCPS and they have a position with MCPS,” says Jeff Martinez, director of recruitment and staffing in the Department of Human Resources and Development. “Sometimes their position can be anywhere in the system.”
That’s what happened this spring to 450 teachers, including some who voluntarily wanted to leave their schools, according to Martinez. And that’s what happened to this teacher, a woman in her mid-50s who’s been teaching for about 15 years after a change of careers.
It was an experience that she never wants to repeat. What followed after she got the news in March was weeks of anxiety as she moved through a process that made her doubt her skills and left her unable to focus on teaching. When talking to other teachers in the same boat, she found that her experience was not unique.
“You become so focused on it, you’re not doing a whole lot of planning,” she says, noting that her math class scored its worst ever on a unit test. “That had a lot to do with how distracted I was.
“We were all really distracted. You multiply that by how many teachers were going through the process, you can tell how much quality teaching was going on.”
Martinez, a former MCPS elementary school principal, acknowledged the anxiety that is inherently built into the transfer process. “It’s anxious anytime you have to move,” he says. “We’re in a wonderful profession where every year we get to renew ourselves. But with that there is a lot of anxiety.”
This teacher was barely able to absorb the news that she would be leaving her school before she had to tell her students because they were hearing about other teachers that were leaving. “The kids find out and they’re crying,” she says. “It really threw me for a loop. It was not what I had expected at all.”
She emailed the parents about her impending departure. The kids made her gifts.
And then she began the interview process. Even though she was an MCPS employee, she still had to redo her résumé and create an online profile that principals could review when deciding whether to hire her.
“It might as well be a job application, because you have to talk about every place you have worked,” she says.
Next was the after-school job fair at Northwest High School in Germantown, where this teacher found that most of other applicants moving through the halls were much younger; seniority is the key factor in determining who is named an involuntary transfer.
She had interviews scheduled with four different schools and each one was a different experience. But there was one that disturbed her. During that interview with a team of teachers, she was certain that the younger teachers weren’t sizing up her abilities and skills, but rather whether she’d fit in with them—like a middle school clique checking out the new kid in school.
“There was a feeling that some of it had to do with age,” she says.
Martinez said his staff is considering whether to continue the job fair, in which principals and teacher teams from schools interview prospective new staff members, because most of the application process is already online.
“Some people think it seems like a cattle call. Unfortunately, that it is,” he says. “We need to decide whether the job fair is something we need to keep on doing. With the few flaws it may have, we still think it’s a good idea to get the most amount of people in the same place at the same time.”
After the job fair, the veteran teacher received one job offer, which she accepted. Only now it probably doesn’t matter. She found out in late May that new changes in enrollment mean she’ll most likely get to keep her current job. Now the principal at what would have been her new school is in limbo waiting to hear whether she’ll be coming.
The months-long process—which she had approached with a sense of optimism—left her drained.
“Part of me was really excited about getting out. If I left, I was hoping to go to middle school,” she says. “Honestly, this was so exhausting. Now, I’m of a mind, I just want to stay here.”
