How does tenure tranfer?

April 18, 2007 8:35 AM

For elementary school teachers, is tenure transferable to other districts/states?

My fiancee is an elementary school teacher in NJ with one year toward her tenure and she's been hired on for another. My understanding is that after three years of service (the first day of the fourth year) she'll earn her tenure. My question is this: is her tenure transferable to other districts or will she need to start over if she moves to a new district? And what I'd really like to know is if we were to move to another state before she gets her tenure, will the years she's put into earning her tenure transfer to the new school?

I'd really like for us to move to CT when it's time to buy a house as houses seem to be slightly cheaper there and that's where I've been working. She's open to the idea but is curious about the timing. Is it better to move before she gets her tenure or after?

posted by bDiddy to education (7 comments total)

I'm pretty sure the answer is "rarely", but I don't have anything to cite other than having heard my teacher friends bitch about it.
posted by hermitosis at 9:13 AM on April 18, 2007

It might vary district to district, but in Stamford it's certainly not. You start at the ground floor, so the sooner you get in the better, same for retirement.

Though if you are talking about cheaper houses, you can't possibly be talking about lower fairfield county anyways so i dunno how helpful i am.
posted by teishu at 9:45 AM on April 18, 2007

I teach in IL. I've got tenure, but if I move to another district- let alone another state, I loose it.

IMHO tenure is over-rated in the first place. You are more likely to loose your job because of budget cuts. Tenure does not protect you from that. Additionally, if they want to get rid of you, Admin will just make you life hell. You'll want to leave anyway.

A school district should give your fiancee credit for years experience. Some will be more generous than others. If they teach in an subject area that is in demand, they'll be more accommodating in their renumeration. If they have more applicants than positions, than they won't.
posted by rryan at 9:47 AM on April 18, 2007

So it sounds like it doesn't matter because either she'd lose it or she wouldn't but there's no way to know for sure.

teishu: Yeah, I'd be looking lower Fairfield. I based my cheaper housing remark based on some idle searching i did on the ol' internets. It's not cheap by any means but it seems like we could get more house for our buck in that area than in NE Bergen county NJ. Not much, but some. Of course, I don't know what towns to look in but that's another question entirely. First I have to get my fiancee to want to move. She already doesn't like NJ, but she has a job and probably won't want to look for another. Me, I worked in the city until I volunteered to work in the Greenwich office. Now the commute from NJ is doable, but I'd like to live closer if at all possible.

P.S. Sorry about the spelling mistake in the title. I rushed to post...
posted by bDiddy at 9:59 AM on April 18, 2007

I don't know what kind of money you make, but there is a huge percentage of teachers in Stamford that live outside of the area because most housing is so expensive.

To help with the question of where to look,

Greenwich, Darien, New Canaan - you need to be making a lot more than a teacher does.

Stamford is a weird mix up with lots of middle class families, though its getting more and more expensive (Its recently been rated as the most expensive place to live, just edging out San Fransisco) and most of the middle class is made up of people who have been in the area for a long time and could never afford to live here otherwise.

Norwalk is more reasonable, but it too is getting super expensive.

Beyond that it depends on how far you're willing to spread your search.

Also, for your wife, Stamford pays better but its a much more "challenging" district than the surrounding towns generally speaking.
posted by teishu at 10:23 AM on April 18, 2007

FWIW, when my parents moved from Texas to Colorado, my mother's 15 years experience teaching in middle and high school meant absolutely nothing to the Colorado school districts. They wouldn't even recognize a percentage of her experience and she would have had to start over at the bottom of the totem pole.
posted by thewittyname at 12:56 PM on April 18, 2007

I used to live in CT, and although I'm not absolutely familiar with how tenure works, I don't think that it would be transferable. I'm not even sure if it's transferable between school districts within CT, except by special arrangements.

I think if she just wrote an email to someone at the Connecticut Education Association (teachers' union), they could give her an answer, or at least point her in the right direction.

Overall, there's a strong demand for teachers in most parts of Connecticut, so even if she has to restart the tenure track, I don't think it's a major career risk. I can't think of any teachers who were actually fired where I used to live (to the point where I'm convinced the system is broken, because there are a few incompetents who should have been canned years ago); the big risk is budget cuts, and as other people have noted, tenure doesn't really protect you there anyway. Just find a town that looks like it's growing and has a strong education lobby at the local levels, and lots of young families.

I think the bigger question is whether she wants to recertify in a new state again. She won't be able to be employed as a full-time teacher in a public school in CT without getting a teaching certificate, and her out-of-state certification isn't acceptable. CT doesn't do reciprocity, although she may be able to use previous work experience in lieu of some of the more time-consuming classroom requirements. (I've been told that CT's certification requirements are pretty strict/involved, compared to other states, and this may be why there's a shortage here. No idea how it compares to NJ's, though; maybe she's already been through an equivalent process.)

Overall, tenure may be one of the lesser of the questions she's going to have to answer in contemplating a move to another state, particularly CT.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:12 PM on April 18, 2007