Yash Roy file photo
Sarah Diggs: Heading from NHPS to TFA.
New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) has yet another vacancy to fill: The administrator in charge of filling vacancies.
That position is the public school district’s coordinator of recruitment and retention.
Since September 2022, Sarah Diggs has filled that role — and has prioritized making NHPS more efficient in its hiring and a more attractive place to work.
Diggs will be resigning from that role as of Sept. 16. She is next going to work for Teach For America Connecticut as their Senior Managing Director of Strategy and Impact.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, NHPS put up a job posting seeking Diggs’s replacement.
The job posting describes the position’s primary focus as the following: “Establishes and maintains a robust and positive working relationship with school principals and central office staff to support the sourcing, assignment, induction, retention, development, and performance of high-quality candidates for all school-based and central office positions. The Coordinator of Recruitment & Retention will support and develop the recruitment initiatives for NHPS through effective planning, design, and development to ensure that top-quality candidates join the NHPS Team.”
All the while, the district still has roughly 200 vacancies left to fill, down from around 220 at this time last year. Over the past year, NHPS hired 244 school staffers and lost 195 to resignations and 32 to retirements.
Reached by phone Wednesday, New Haven Federation of Teachers (NHFT) President Leslie Blatteau said Diggs’s resignation is a huge loss for the district. She praised Diggs for working with the teachers union and for using her past experience as an educator to inform her work with retention and understanding the needs of teachers.
Over the past two years, she said, Diggs was an “incredibly hard worker” who recognized educators’ working conditions. She did so by being a listening ear and being well versed in the teachers’ contract.
Blatteau added that she hopes the district fills the key position with someone who also has worked in a school building to “validate those experiences.” She noted that NHPS’ Human Resources department deserves more support because of its direct work to help educators feel supported and heard.
“A lot of people think that the ongoing teacher shortage is just a recruitment issue, and it’s not just a recruitment issue, it’s a retention issue. Sarah understood retention and that we’re not going to recruit our way out of the problem,” Blatteau said.
She concluded that it was refreshing to have district admin like Diggs on the central office team because it allowed her to feel comfortable connecting concerned educators with Diggs, who listened and documented staff concerns.
In a email response Thursday, schools spokesperson Justin Harmon told the Independent, “This is a vital position and one we intend to fill as soon as possible.” He did not respond to whether an interim staffer will fill in for the role during the search process.
Diggs told the Independent Thursday that she has enjoyed working with Blatteau and the teachers union executive board. “We both know that in order for students to access learning, that the educators caring for them must be cared for. She has been a true partner in the recruitment and retention work I’ve done in the city in this role. I am appreciative of her leadership and partnership,” Diggs said.
Diggs was also a leader of the district’s right-sizing process, which she described as crucial and hard work that aimed to “ensure all students in all schools in all classrooms within NHPS have qualified staff, specifically to ensure equitable resources across the district by adjusting staffing and resources to enrollment trends.”
Diggs concluded that she is most proud of working with the Human Resources team to implement new vacancy and hiring-tracking systems, developing the district’s Increasing Educator Diversity plan, and helping to develop the district’s new Strategic Operating Plan strategy to recruit and retain NHPS staffers.
She said she looks forward to collaborating with NHPS while in her new Teach for America Connecticut role.