Cal Lynch's anger over school spending in Mt. Lebanon turned to bewilderment when he noticed the district had added a position to the proposed budget after phasing out others to cut costs.
"Elementary math facilitator," he said, speaking to the school board during a spring meeting. "Do we really need that?"
The answer from some local schools is that they need to change as the demands of their programs change. Modern curriculum decisions go well beyond picking books.
Schools have to evaluate how programs are taught and how students are assessed, officials say, and that deeper analysis requires more work. Districts are hiring more people to do it, including a growing class of middle managers called coaches, leaders or facilitators.
They ensure that teachers get professional support and that curriculum is uniform and streamlined. Some are teachers paid a few thousand dollars for the extra work. A few others are full-time staffers, paid as much as the most experienced teachers.
"For larger school districts, they're a godsend," said Jeff Taylor, an administrator at North Hills School District and a committee chairman with the Pennsylvania Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. "You really need some help in those content areas when you have multiple buildings and thousands of kids to worry about. It's a lot more efficient."
State education leaders say the number of full-time staff devoted to curriculum can be difficult to gauge, but it is likely increasing. There were 194 curriculum and instructional supervisors last school year, according to the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. They average almost $92,000 in salary.
The Annenberg Foundation is conducting a three-year, $31 million initiative to put instructional coaches in schools across the state, in part to help teachers with curriculum. Other types of full-time curriculum staff members below administrative rank are becoming more popular, said Stinson Stroup, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators.
Mt. Lebanon officials budgeted $55,157 for a new elementary math facilitator. The district has a director of student support services and nine subject-area supervisors who oversee curriculum.
Drew Haberberger is in his second year as middle school science and math facilitator there. A common day takes him between the two middle schools, where he moves from classroom to classroom to ensure the district's new science program is working.
He peers over the shoulders of sixth-graders in an earth science class as they work in groups, gauging how well they process the material. A physics teacher he observed stops him in the hall to ask for quick feedback on the lesson he taught.
He said life for teachers without such facilitators "would be a lot of hit or miss, there's no doubt. Certain pieces of content for sure they would be comfortable with, and certain assessment techniques they would be comfortable with, but for a teacher in class every day who doesn't (get) much training outside the classroom, or doesn't have time to think every day about these new concepts ... they would be lucky to implement a lot of these things."
Quaker Valley School District created a similar position at its high school two years ago, called a secondary academic specialist. That's Linda Conlon, who was hired in 1995 for "gifted support," but saw her position gradually evolve to include all of the high school's curriculum.
District officials see Advanced Placement as "the gold standard," Conlon said, so part of her tasks became gearing the curriculum so students could succeed at that level. This year, 125 students took Advanced Placement courses, versus 30 the year she was hired.
This year, she started working with a computer program called TechPaths, which allows teachers to put descriptions of everything they teach into a database. That type of data used to sit in binders collecting dust in a central office; now, all the teachers have instant access to it, and use it to avoid repeating lessons from grade to grade, Conlon said.
"It's nice to see where I can start," Spanish teacher Michael Haboush said. "Do I need to start from the beginning, or can I give more advanced work?"
This work is known as "curriculum mapping," and many local districts say they are doing it.
Hiring more full-time staff would be a luxury, said Joseph Petrella, the assistant superintendent at Gateway School District, who leaves the facilitation and coaching to principals.
"My approach is that all the principals need to be experts in the curriculum so they can lead," he said. "When you look at the role of a principal, their main role is instructional leader. To eliminate that would be a disservice, in my opinion. If you're a leader and overseeing that building, you have to know what's being taught and be very skilled about what the content is in each subject area."
At North Hills, curriculum leaders are teachers who get extra time free from class. Bethel Park and Upper St. Clair use part-time curriculum leaders.
North Hills has 16 leaders, making stipends of either $2,866 or $3,866. At Upper St. Clair, they make $5,000, $8,000 or $11,000, which is as much as five times what department heads make .
"If you have one leader for all departments in every building, you have uniformity across the board," Taylor said. "With each department head doing their own thing in each building, you may not get what you want."
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