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Civil Beat received vague and contradictory answers from the Hawaii Department of Education while trying to nail down what incentives it offers teachers in hard-to-staff schools.

When I first asked about incentive programs, outlined in a related article today, communications director Sandy Goya pointed me to Kerry Tom, the department’s administrator for teacher recruitment. Instead of putting him on the spot with a phone call, I decided to e-mail Tom in advance with my questions. The June 29 e-mail asked:

• What are some of the most difficult-to-reach positions in Hawaii’s school district? Are they geographic, or subject-related?
• The Hawaii Educational Policy Center in observed that some schools with the highest teacher turnover rates in the system were not classified as hard-to-staff schools. What are the characteristics that make a school officially hard-to-staff by the department’s standards?
• Are any of those characteristics changeable? Has the department considered changing the circumstances to make the positions easier to fill?
• What incentives does the department offer to fill those positions? Have they proved effective?
  Some teachers say even one-time “signing bonuses” for those difficult positions aren’t good for long-term stability. Has the department considered anything along the lines of a differential pay schedule to help maintain quality instructors in those positions?

In our July 2 phone call, Tom said the department had recruitment incentives “up until this last school year.”

We found a department from 2009 that said recruitment incentives for teachers had been suspended in the 2008-09 school year.

It’s possible some incentives were ended, he said, but “I think we were still paying out as of this school year (2009-10).”

The district offers multiple types of incentives. Civil Beat was interested in those for hard-to-staff schools, to see if the incentives were making a dent in high turnover and low performance.

“If teachers work in hard-to-staff areas, they can get a $3,000 bonus with that,” Tom said. “Currently it’s continuous if you keep working in those areas.”

He mentioned two geographic areas when asked which ones were covered by the bonus. He also said the program had been in place “for quite a while,” but that he didn’t have data on when it began.

“We look at retention,” he replied when I asked how the department determines hard-to-staff schools. “Continuity at the school is very important.”

So how does the department calculate retention rates? I asked. And how low does the retention have to be to qualify a school or geographic region as hard-to-staff?

Tom pointed me to the department’s .

“That’s generally the type of data we provide, and it does classify which schools are hard-to-staff,” he said. But I discovered that the report makes no mention of hard-to-staff areas or incentive bonuses of any kind.

He also referred me to the website.

“This is definitely something the department considers a priority,” he told me about teacher retention.”I think it’s close to the No. 1 issue.”

So I took a little time to do some more background research using the resources he had mentioned — and others he hadn’t. And, as is almost always the case during research, the more information I found, the more questions I had. On July 13, I e-mailed Tom with some follow-up questions, hoping I would be met with better success:

• Are the same as “hard-to-staff” schools? 
• If not, I really would like to know how the department calculates/determines which schools/complex areas qualify as “hard-to-staff.”

He did not respond to the e-mail, so I called him two days later to ensure he had received it. Yes, he had seen it, he said, but he hadn’t had time to think about it. He kindly agreed to field my questions right then, however.

So together we went over the document I had questions about, and I took the opportunity to ask him about the , which appeared to be a circa 2007 document outlining the history, purpose and data relating to geographic incentives.

“What was that called again?” Tom asked me when I mentioned the equity plan, following it up with a request for me to e-mail him a link to the document. “I’ve never heard of that.”

He then couldn’t tell me for certain whether the geographic bonus program described in the plan was the same as the geographic bonus program kept mentioning.

As for whether the incentive program he referred to is still in place: “I think we were still paying those bonuses out as of this past school year,” he said.

The difference between “I think” and “I know” could dramatically change the premise of my entire story, I told him. “The headline will either read ‘Teacher Incentives Suspended’ or ‘Teacher Incentives Might Get Suspended.’ I need to know which it is: Have they been suspended or not?”

“They might get suspended,” Tom said.

A district-level personnel manager was able to answer with more certainty that the incentives had remained in place through the 2009-10 school year.

How many teachers currently receive the incentives, again?

Tom couldn’t tell me, he said, without running the risk of misinforming me.