Teacher goes 0-for-15 in job search

In a polite-yet-indignant schoolteacher kind of way, Gina Shelley admits it. She's disgruntled. And the more she thinks about it, the more disgruntled she gets.

Her gripe has to do with the fact that she can't get a teaching job close to her home in Pleasant Grove. Since April, she's applied repeatedly for positions in three nearby school districts — Provo, Alpine and Jordan — and so far she's like 0-for-15. She's in a worse slump than Real Salt Lake.

She's gotten her hopes up a couple of times. She left one interview sure she'd get the job. But after the school "checked with the district," she wound up getting the same form letter as from all the others, "Thank you for applying, we have offered the position to someone else...."

The good news for Gina is that she has a job. She teaches at Wasatch Mountain Junior High over the mountain in Heber City. But that means excessive miles on her car and a lot of fill-ups at the gas station.

The source of her discontent is the much-publicized teacher shortage in Utah. School districts are begging for public school teachers. This summer, four Utah school districts went so far as to send representatives to Mexico, where a dozen teachers were hired. They will start this fall, working on visas that will expire in three years.

Gina Shelley views the circumstances of those hires skeptically.

"The fact that they're hiring for three years is very convenient," she notes. "New teachers typically go through a three-year probationary period before they receive tenure. That means that they (the teachers imported from Mexico) will have to leave before they have tenure and then they can be replaced by new teachers who will be paid first-year salaries."

"Do they want teachers in Utah who are qualified or do they want cheap teachers?" she wonders.

She asks this from the position of a teacher who definitely isn't cheap. With her education — a bachelor's from BYU, a master's from the University of Utah and a Ph.D. that is one dissertation from completion — Gina is far from an entry-level hire.

Add in her 10 years of experience and the fact that she speaks fluent Spanish — she served an LDS mission to Honduras and has experience teaching English as a second language — and even if she is just 33 years old, she is a $50,000-a-year teacher, at a minimum.

She suspects it's her glossy resume that's killing her chances at getting the jobs she wants.

"Legally, of course, they (the administrators) can't say I'm not getting hired because I'm overqualified.

They can't discriminate on that basis," she says. "So I'm just going on my own assumptions that it's because I cost too much. They could pay for two brand new first-year teachers or they could pay for me."