BCLUW enters first year of TLC

The Teacher Leadership and Compensation grant, now in its third year of existence, provides additional funding to school districts for instructional coaching and new technology in the classroom, and this year, small schools around the area including BCLUW are implementing the change. Superintendent Ben Petty, full-time instructional coach Stacy Simpson and technology instruction coach Karen Hammers spoke to The Grundy Register about the program, the changes it will bring and how it can help them to provide better educational opportunities for students.
 
According to the Iowa Department of Education, the TLC “rewards effective teachers with leadership opportunities and higher pay, attracts promising new teachers with competitive starting salaries and more support, and fosters greater collaboration for all teachers to learn from each other.” It provides about $308.82 per pupil, which amounts to over $170,000 annually for BCLUW (and $50 million total across the state this year), mostly put toward stipends for the new leadership positions and district wide initiatives in hopes of improving the overall quality of instruction. Currently, Iowa is the only state in the union with a program of this nature that is fully state-funded.
 
“We have several teachers involved with this that are still full-time teachers, but they’ll have some additional time, additional roles and responsibilities,” Petty said. “It’ll be an interesting journey for all of us, because we’re just not used to these types of things in small schools. No smaller rural schools really had programs like this in place.”
 
Read more in this week's Grundy Register.