Episode Details

Anthony Godfrey:
Hello and welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. It was a huge celebration with cheerleaders, a drum line, mascots, administrators, and more gathered to welcome 450 new teachers to Jordan School District.

On this episode of the Supercast, we hear from some of those teachers about their journey to Jordan and what they are most excited about as they head into classrooms for the upcoming school year. We start by listening in as the crowd goes wild when the new teachers arrive for their first day in Jordan School District.

Announcer:
Hello guys, welcome to Jordan District! We're so excited you are here. Come on through!

Anthony Godfrey:
We're at West Jordan Middle School this morning. We have four different media outlets covering our new teacher induction. This is a return to in-person new teacher inductions after a long desert of COVID years where we were online and doing virtual inductions. So we're going to talk to the human resources department now to talk a little bit about today's event. Introduce yourself and tell us about what's going on today.

Jane Olsen:
Hi, I'm Jane Olsen. I'm the HR specialist over hiring, recruiting, and licensing for elementary schools and today we're gonna be welcoming about 450 educators.

Anthony Godfrey:
450! When I tell people that they are amazed at the number of new teachers we have every year. It's really exciting though.

Jane Olsen:
Yes, it is. Very very exciting. Ten percent of those are gonna be new graduates so we've got young ones coming in.

Anthony Godfrey:
That's fantastic. Now these are teachers who are teaching everything from preschool all the way to post high school.

Jane Olsen:
Yeah, and we also have our school psychologists, our SLPs, all of those education support staff are welcome to be joining us today.

Anthony Godfrey:
And we have teachers and licensed educators from all over. Tell me about that.

Jane Olsen:
Yeah, so we ran the numbers a few days ago and it looks like we're covering about 20 states and eight different countries that are going to be represented today.

Anthony Godfrey:
That's fantastic and we've cast a wide net over the past few years to bring in as many great teachers as we can and this year we've had some really great candidates. As I've talked with elementary principals they've reported that they've had 40 or even 50 qualified candidates for every position.

Jane Olsen:
Yeah, the depth of the pools even up through last week was wonderful. We were hiring special education teachers with professional licenses even up through last week.

Anthony Godfrey:
And it's exciting to see that we're hiring at greater numbers than ever before, but we're filling those positions faster than ever before, and we're drawing from a deeper, deeper pool, as you said. So we've got some fantastic teachers here. Tell me a little bit about what we're doing for teachers today.

Jane Olsen:
So today we are welcoming them with a big clap in. There's quite a scene out here with cheerleaders and mascots and even some of our principals are dressed up today. And we're going to be providing them with a backpack from the community that is full of supplies and gifts and certificates for all different things. We could not do today without the community support that we've had and the amount of donations and generosity of