The West Ada School District is investing up to $1.8 million in 17 new elementary administrator positions amid calls for more support in primary classrooms. 

Elementary teachers have asked for more assistance “managing student needs in an increasingly complex classroom environment,” Niki Scheppers, the district’s chief of staff for communications, wrote in an email. And elementary principals say they need more support so they can better focus on leading their schools. 

The new administrators, called deans of student achievement or DOSAs, will be in place by next school year. Already, more than 100 candidates have applied for the 17 positions, said Marcus Myers, the district’s chief academic officer. 

As school leaders across the nation grapple with post-pandemic upticks in challenging student behaviors, adding elementary leadership positions is one way to address those behavioral and academic needs at an earlier age. 

“This initiative represents a major step forward in strengthening academic support systems, improving behavioral interventions, and expanding school leadership capacity at the K–5 level,” Scheppers said. “It is designed to provide targeted, school-level leadership in support of student achievement and well-being—ensuring that each elementary school is equipped to meet the growing complexity of instructional and behavioral needs.

Gwenda Venecia, principal at Prospect Elementary, spoke about how elementary learning environments have changed. Students have become less able to focus “for any length of time,” even short, 15-minute increments, she said.

“There’s a lot of off-task behavior, a lot of inability to complete work,” she said. “As a society, we’ve changed a lot in how kids interact with the world and so it is much harder to just do that talking back and forth that’s required in a learning setting.”

In a class of 30 students, if a large percentage of students are unable to focus, then teachers end up “redirecting kids all the time,” she continued. “That’s what we spend a lot of our day doing, is teaching learner behaviors.”

Personal devices are part of the problem, Venecia said. While cell phones are not allowed in class, smart watches are. About a third of Prospect’s K-5 elementary students have them, Venecia said, and they get distracted when messages come in, or they buzz or beep. Even if notifications are turned off like they are supposed to be, students change screen savers or fidget with them instead of focusing on the task at hand. 

Many of the district’s elementary schools are facing extreme behavior that goes beyond distraction, Venecia said, and ranges from students cussing to running out of the classroom and refusing to return, to being defiant and quick to tell adults “no.”

The elementary deans will be tasked with overseeing intervention programs aimed at helping students struggling behaviorally or academically. Principals like Venecia will continue to help, but will now have more time to support teachers and focus on achieving the bigger picture of the school’s goals and vision. 

As student misbehavior is increasing, school leaders and teachers are also doing more to identify and help students who need support.

It’s become a big load to carry. 

“If we ask our administrators to do more, we ask our teachers to better meet the needs of students through systems and processes that we develop, we have to be able to provide some level of support for that,” Myers said. “And I think that the Dean of Student Achievement position is a start for that.”

Costs and benefits of the new dean positions

The 17 DOSAs will be spread across the district’s 34 elementary schools, with each DOSA assigned to two schools. The DOSAs will be certified, early-career administrators who will be learning the ropes so they are more equipped to become principals. 

The DOSA program will be replacing the district’s current principal internship program — which typically funds about a dozen full-time interns who work in elementary and secondary schools districtwide. 

The switch to the DOSA program will have tradeoffs. On one hand, every elementary school will now have a half-time DOSA, whereas before they may or may not have had an administrative intern. 

And DOSAs will be paid administrative salaries of up to $105,000, while principal interns were making teachers’ salaries. But on the other hand, the district may not be able to fund principal interns at the secondary level anymore, depending on how the budget looks. 

And the DOSA program comes with a higher price tag — as much as $1.8 million in salaries alone (that figure will climb with benefits).

The intern program funds will cover a big chunk, but not all, Myers said. 

So the district has eliminated leadership stipends, currently given to teachers who help with interventions, and will divert those funds to DOSAs. And some of the funds have come from eliminating or reducing full-time positions through attrition. 

“We’ll make those adjustments without impacting our classrooms as much as we possibly can,” Myers said.

Cindy Marshall, who teaches fourth grade at Prospect Elementary, said she is excited that Venecia, her principal, will have “another person to be able to carry that instructional leadership load with.”

And the new DOSAs will help teachers implement what’s called “flex time.” For two half-hour periods each day, students are sorted into groups where they get academic support tailored to their needs. 

“The payoff is great,” Marshall said about the flex time periods. Without those interventions, some students could “slip under the radar” and fall behind.

“The DOSA isn’t going to … be the person that takes on and fixes everything,” she said. “But I think it’s going to be an important gear to help the system run more smoothly.” 

Myers said the district is planning to measure the DOSAs’ effectiveness by looking at student achievement levels, teacher observations, staff feedback, future survey results and the impact of the DOSA program on the principal pipeline.

“Once we get our (DOSAs) hired, we want to work directly with them and with their building principals to really refine what the roles and responsibilities are and how we measure the outcome,” Myers said.