On Thursday, April 6, Mancos hosted an education solutions task force meeting in the Mancos school cafeteria to discuss issues facing the district such as low teacher compensation and retention rates.

The hourlong meeting launched the task force’s efforts to improve education compensation, working conditions and community support for preschool through 12th grade education in Mancos.

I encourage all staff to attend this voluntary committee meeting if your schedule and interest allow it,” Superintendent Todd Cordrey said. “I hope this starts a movement in our community to prioritize education as an upstream solution to many downstream social challenges through appropriate funding.”

Cordrey said they hope the community will work to improve compensation, state advocacy, housing and retention and to weigh in on administration changes so that “Montezuma County can thrive as a community academically, economically and socially.”

They have been working on this task force for about 18 months. “We’ve been exploring the issue of retention, recruitment and compensation for educators in Mancos as well as Montezuma County,” he said.

“We’re really in a crisis situation in Montezuma County,” he said. “The education funding is at a place where it could significantly disrupt the quality of education in our county for the three school districts here.”

About 30 people attended the meeting, and Cordrey said they were divided into five groups and given a topic to consider.

The topics were revenue, administration, housing, community support and state advocacy and enrollment growth and classroom support.

On Feb. 24, Cordrey and Chelsea Lunders gave a presentation detailing their plans for the task force to the Mancos school board.

Cordrey has had two decades of management leadership experience in preschool through 12th grade education systems, and Lunders is an anthropologist who has spent 13 years studying topics of education and health care.

“If we don’t do something now, we are going to wake up one day and not have a school to send our kids to because we won’t have any teachers,” a teacher said in their study.

In their opening, Cordrey and Lunders presented statistics that showed how dire teacher vacancies were becoming in the U.S. There are more than 36,500 teacher vacancies nationwide and more than 163,000 teacher positions are filled by individuals who are not fully certified in education. Additionally, 70% of Colorado school districts have unfilled teacher positions.

Colorado pays teachers an average of 35.9% less than individuals nationwide with the same level of college education. According to Cordrey, schools in New Mexico and Durango pay teachers about $15,000 more than teachers in Montezuma County.

“We are dramatically under what others pay, and we’re struggling to keep the high-quality staff we have,” Cordrey said. “This speaks to the underappreciation of educators in our society.”

They noted that the “triple threat” to the future of education is low compensation, unbalanced pressures and support and loss of respect and autonomy. Their research found that teaching was among the lowest-paying degree-level jobs in the United States, and many teachers work multiple jobs to make ends meet.

Along with low pay, teachers say they lack the support they need to solve problems in the classrooms.

“We see teachers breaking away because they don’t want to be in this system and having to handle all the problems coming along … the reputation of teaching as a career field is suffering,” they said.

As they further studied where Mancos stands with the “triple threat,” they found the district was low-risk for loss of respect and autonomy, medium-risk for unbalanced pressures and support, and high-risk for low compensation for teachers.

While talking to Mancos teachers, they found that teachers were happy with the district because of the community culture, the feeling of family, the freedom to teach and smaller class sizes.

Despite the many positives, they did find one glaring issue in their research – the issue of teacher retention and pay in Mancos.

“Students want routines, and if we want a positive experience, we just have to keep teachers here,” they said. “This is the only thing we can do. It hinges on this, and it’s scary as a parent to think that your kid is going to have four different math teachers.”

Solutions proposed to help maintain teacher retention in the district were better pay, maternity leave, reducing working Fridays, conducting an impact fee assessment, creating a welcoming program for new teachers, and working with programs that will provide teacher training.

They noted that salary increases help with retention rates. In a national study, salary increases went hand-in-hand with growing retention rates, with a 10% salary increase resulting in 29% decrease in teacher departures.

Ways to increase salaries mentioned were various grants, mill levy override, state-level advocacy, affordable housing and more.

“Things outside of Mancos feel tumultuous, but in Mancos we are all sitting down and problem-solving together,” they said. “Mancos has done a great job of putting things in place that will carry us through a few hard years. Parents feel respected by the school board. We have a good level of trust in the administration, the board and the teachers.”

The next task force meeting will be May 4 from 4:30-5:30 p.m. in the Mancos school cafeteria. All are welcome to attend, and child care is provided.