After This Year, Only Two Familiar Faces Remain
By Ingy Fahmy
At the start of next year, only two high school foreign-hire teachers will be present from this year’s teaching staff. The faculty turnover will be huge at the beginning of the upcoming academic year and it is questionable just how much change the Schutz community can handle at a time.
Living in Alexandria, or in Egypt, in general can be a huge adjustment to many individuals who are unfamiliar with Egyptian cultural styles. This unfamiliarity can be a cause for many teachers to decide to either break their contracts or leave right when the contract expires without wanting to renew it. These situations have happened in the past, particularly over the past four years or so. A lot of these individuals just cannot adjust well to cultures that are completely different from what they have been harbored in or accustomed to.
Another reason Schutz is suffering from such a huge turnover is as a consequence or results of experiencing staff retention in the past couple of years. In particular, two years ago, Schutz underwent a major change in the faculty teachers. The case at the time was that a few teachers broke their contracts and decided to leave either at the end of the school year, meaning their contract of two years would be disregarded, or even in the middle of the school year. Consequently, Schutz offers its teachers a two-year contract, which means that the new teachers who arrived two years ago completed their time and would like to move on to new places. Many of the teachers during this period were not content with the behavior and performance of the overall Upper School student body. Others were simply not satisfied with the city and its offering as well as the school as a whole.
Since then, there have been major improvements on the students’ behalf. Many assemblies and workshops held by various organization including the Schutz Honor Society, High School Student Council, and competitions organized by Schutz’s counselor, Ms. Rovack. However, it would be non-realistic to propose that Schutz students are exhibiting perfect behavior and achieving 100% in performance. Consequently, many of the teachers leaving this year did not mention that the reason for their departure had anything to do with students’ behavior.
Reasons for departure vary from one teacher to the next: some want to be constantly on the move, others are committed to family reasons, some dislike the culture of the country and the students, others are unsatisfied with the administration, some decide they want to retire, while others even settle on a different job field. Either way, the Schutz community suffers greatly from such changes happening all at once. I believe one way to escape this fate is to be sure of the new faculty teachers being hired. When potential teachers are being interviewed, they should be asked about any plans or their intentions of their post-two year contract. There should be a variance in the teachers hired based on the answer to the questions in this particular area. Schutz should no be destined to undergo a massive turnover every couple of years. Just because it started a few years back does not make it okay for the following years to be walking down the same path. We need faculty to go one-by-one, not all at once.
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