The Dallas Independent School District (DISD) Board of Trustees held its final meeting of the year on Thursday and voted on a slew of items intended to mitigate the district’s teacher retention crisis.

Two motions unanimously passed by the board established agreements with Dallas College and the University of North Texas (UNT) that would allow their students — ostensibly without bachelor’s degrees or a state certification to teach — to serve as “interns” and “residents” at DISD schools.

The interlocal agreement with Dallas College cited the “extreme needs of school systems across the Dallas area,” of which DISD is by far the largest.

While the deal with UNT explicitly states that “interns” would not be allowed to serve as the instructor of record, it will enable them to carry out “major professional functions” in the teaching environment.

It is unclear, however, whether uncertified Dallas College “interns” and “residents” would assume primary teaching responsibilities in DISD classrooms.

The agreements seem to resemble, in part, DISD’s alternative certification program, which places uncertified teachers in classrooms after just a few months of training, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.

A separate motion voted on at Thursday’s meeting authorized DISD to re-enter the Texas-Spain Visiting Teacher Program, which would allow the district to sponsor Spanish nationals to teach at its schools as it tries to find enough educators to staff its classrooms adequately.

DISD has been scrambling to recruit enough state-certified educators for years, resorting to recruiting abroad from Colombia and Mexico and even pulling 45 staff members from its central office earlier this school year to reassign them to fill teacher vacancies.

The Dallas Express caught up with Trustee Edwin Flores at the board meeting. When asked about the most recent Texas Education Agency (TEA) data on teacher turnover, which clocked DISD’s rate at roughly 13.8% for the 2020-2021 academic year, Flores stated:

“If you look up data on urban school district turnover, it’s like 10 to 15%, depending on the economy. Our lowest was like 8% when the economy goes down and nobody wants to, you know, give up their jobs. But you know, people move, people retire, people change jobs, families move. It’s totally normal.”

He went on to applaud the new agreements with Dallas College and UNT as beneficial to the undergrads seeking a career in education, stating, “So you know, giving these internships and these opportunities makes it possible for people to find out, ‘Is this for me or not for me?'”

When pressed further on teacher turnover, Flores responded, “When you’re talking about anything within 10% and 15%, it’s totally right. Nothing unusual. Do we want to lose them? No, of course not.”

As previously reported in The Dallas Express, DISD has for years placed a greater emphasis on recruiting new teachers rather than attempting to retain its veteran educators, who continue to leave the district in droves. Meanwhile, the dedicated teachers who remain — and even those who are newly hired — fight an uphill battle against the district’s numerous issues as they try to educate their students.

It is unclear how much of an impact the retention crisis has been having on DISD’s flagging student achievement outcomes, with nearly 20% of its class of 2022 failing to graduate on time and only 41% of its students scoring at grade level on the last year’s STAAR exam.