As we told you after the Perry School Board’s November meeting, the district is offering the early retirement this year and already four teachers are looking to take advantage of this opportunity.
During Monday’s meeting, the board approved the early retirement of high school English teacher Linda Kaufman, middle school physical education teacher Mike Long, high school business teacher Sharon Ulrich and middle and high school vocal music teacher Gary Weishaar.
Superintendent Lynn Ubben says retirements are usually bittersweet.
“It’s kind of one of those good news, bad news things that we’re very happy for those people and we’re happy that we’re able to offer that to those people but we hate to see them go. You know we have some great staff members that every other year, or every few years decide to take that option and their shoes are hard to fill” says Ubben.
Ubben says it may be more difficult to fill specific positions like the vocal music teacher spot, but all of these teachers are irreplaceable.
“If you look at those four people, that’s a lot of years of experience, you have some awesome staff members there. When people ask ‘can you replace them?’ that’s pretty tough to say because that will probably never happen but we will do our best to get some people that can provide the things our kids need. I also know these people and that if we had to call them for some extra help or some mentoring of our younger staff, they would do it” adds Ubben.
Teachers have until March 15th to submit an early retirement request.