In 2022, Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools, CJP, and The Beker Foundation partnered to launch Stronger Together, a pilot project based on the premise that collaboration among the 14 Boston-area Jewish day schools would strengthen the entire ecosystem. Prizmah operates the project with a full-time local director, and The Beker Foundation, CJP, and other local funders have provided the initial investment for the three-year pilot.  

Since launching Stronger Together in December 2022, we have implemented over a dozen initiatives, including job-alike groups, shared resources, student-facing initiatives, professional development, and teacher support.

As we learned more about the most critical needs of our schools, it became clear that, like the rest of the Jewish education and broader education sector, our day schools here in Boston were facing a talent challenge. Recruiting, retaining, and supporting classroom teachers was a common issue they all faced. So, we decided to concentrate our attention on designing a solution.

Focusing on the immediate need to hire classroom teachers for the upcoming year, we identified an education recruiter to help us broaden our collective pool of applicants, expand our reach, and hire teachers for multiple schools in our network. 

Designing the initiative

In order for this project to succeed, we first needed to get school leaders to think a little differently about the hiring process, and to trust that by working together, we would both save them time and end up with a better pool of teaching candidates.

Of course, the first step was to find a talented professional with recruitment experience who understood the way schools operate, and had some familiarity with Jewish education. We were very fortunate to find someone who checked all the boxes: Leslie Knight had worked in schools, had recruitment experience, and was actively involved in the Jewish community. She was exactly what we were looking for.

With Leslie on board, we began working together to design the project. We presented our ideas to the heads of school, incorporated their feedback, and refined our plan.

We knew that in order to get the support of the schools, we would need to provide them with real value. Of course, our first priority was to fill all the open positions with qualified candidates, but it was also important to take the most time-intensive elements of the recruitment and hiring process off the plates of very busy school leaders. Once it became clear that this would save them time, we had the buy-in we needed. Six schools from across the religious spectrum opted in.

Ready to launch

Although we knew that recruitment season wouldn’t really begin until at least March, we launched the initiative in January. Leslie spent January and February getting to know each school, speaking with the hiring managers, creating tracking systems and communication protocols, writing and editing job descriptions, and figuring out the best places to post each position. In March, she began posting jobs and accepting applications.  

We built relationships with schools of education, posted positions on university job boards, and reached out to public and independent schools in the area for possible job sharing opportunities. Through these efforts, we increased visibility for our schools and laid the foundations for future collaboration.  

Leslie communicated with hiring managers throughout the process, sometimes multiple times each week, to make sure all jobs were posted accurately, to get updates on interview processes, and help ensure that we were finding the most qualified candidates. 

Leslie also did an initial vetting of each candidate, adding notes to a tracking spreadsheet with a tab for each school. This helped hiring managers focus their time on the most qualified candidates. 

Was the project successful?

In the end, we filled over 80% of the open positions we were given. We had over 150 qualified applicants, including retired public school teachers, recent school of education graduates, and current educators, as well as some looking to make a career change. The feedback we received from school leaders was that they received more candidates, and most importantly, more qualified candidates, than in previous years.

Because we were recruiting for positions across multiple schools, we built a large pool of qualified candidates. As a result, as positions were filled, we were able to reach out to candidates who did not get the job they applied for and ask them if they were interested in positions at other schools. This led to larger interview pools and ultimately to several high-quality hires. When one school realized at the end of the year that they needed to hire a fourth grade teacher, we were able to immediately send them several qualified candidates, one of whom was quickly hired. This would never have been possible without a shared recruiter who could see all the candidates and knew about open positions across multiple schools.

In the end, this was an impactful initiative that addressed a real challenge faced by the schools. It was something they could not have easily done on their own, and it served schools of all sizes, including our smallest and largest schools, and included schools across the religious spectrum. For the coming year, we will make a few adjustments and look forward to helping hire even more teachers for our diverse group of Boston-area Jewish day schools.

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