Transition Kindergarten Teacher, Witchcraft Heights Elementary School, Salem Public Schools SY2024-2025
About Salem Public Schools, where belonging leads to opportunity.
Salem is a small, diverse city with a proud maritime and immigrant history. Salem Public Schools is an urban public school district enrolling nearly 4,000 students across our 11 schools. Our vision is to ensure that all students will be locally engaged, globally connected, and fully prepared to thrive in a diverse and changing world. We hold dear our core values of belonging, equity, and opportunity in everything we do. Over the next three years (2023-2026), we are committed to the work outlined by the four core priorities in our strategic plan: 1) Elevate Learning; 2) Empower Educators; 3) Center Belonging; and 4) Strengthen Our Foundation. We seek individuals who are passionate about urban education and understand the urgency of improving student achievement for all students, regardless of ability, economic status, gender/gender identity, language, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or other backgrounds. Applicants who have experience working in urban schools and settings and are bilingual are strongly encouraged to apply.
Program Description:
Provide a short-term, intensive general education bridge for students who are not yet prepared to meet the academic, social, or emotional demands of a traditional kindergarten.
What You’ll Do:
Facilitate a structured program and class environment that promotes developmentally appropriate learning and personal growth. Establish effective rapport with students to motivate them in developing the skills, attitudes, and knowledge necessary for a strong kindergarten foundation. Build positive relationships with parents, staff, and sending schools to support each student’s transition and success.
Role Responsibilities:
Duties of this position include, but are not limited to:
Instruction:
- Teach core content aligned with Massachusetts Curriculum Standards.
- Develop hands-on, engaging lessons using district curricular resources and adapt materials to meet the needs of diverse learners.
- Provide individualized and small-group instruction tailored to each student’s learning needs.
- Design academic tasks that provide opportunities for multiple means of expression, engagement, and representation to meet diverse student needs.
- Utilize instructional strategies such as play, inquiry, group discussions, and student pair-share activities.
Student Engagement:
- Explicitly teach, reinforce, and integrate social emotional learning skills such as self-awareness, self-management, relationship skills and responsible decision-making skills throughout the school day.
- Actively engage with children to foster a positive and healthy learning environment where students feel safe taking risks, building self-esteem and emotional literacy, and developing resilience
Classroom Environment:
- Build a positive classroom environment that supports the academic, social-emotional, and behavioral needs of students.
- Actively model and reinforce expected behaviors, integrating teaching and re-teaching opportunities as needed.
- Facilitate developmentally appropriate academic and social activities for Kindergarten students throughout the day.
- Structure transitions between classroom activities, ensuring clear expectations for student movement and tasks.
- Establish, review, and model classroom agreements and rules daily to support a positive classroom environment.
- Implement and consistently apply classroom management strategies, ensuring students understand expected responses to behaviors.
- Ability to follow intervention plans
Student Assessment and Progress Monitoring:
- Assess students’ academic and social-emotional growth using common assessments, DESSA screening, and anecdotal notes.
- Maintain accurate student records and track progress to ensure readiness for kindergarten.
Communication and Collaboration:
- Communicate regularly with parents through conferences and other means to discuss student progress and provide updates.
- Collaborate with sending schools to ensure a smooth transition back to the student’s home school and access to any wrap-around services.
Professional Growth:
- Maintain professional competence through ongoing professional development and in-service coaching.
What You’ll Bring:
We are looking for candidates who have diverse backgrounds and experiences, are inspired by our mission and are highly motivated to change children’s lives through education. You’ll be right at home here if you are a reflective practitioner who values collaboration with colleagues and pushes yourself, your work and the people around you to the next level. We expect our SPS employees to:
- Hold a deep commitment to students and families and value diversity - The SPS community is vibrant, diverse in background, ethnicity, language, and perspective. You embrace and affirm the backgrounds of all members of the SPS community and view our diversity as a powerful resource that supports us each in learning and doing our best work.
- Hold high expectations for yourself, students, and colleagues – You see potential in all, especially our SPS students, and maintain high expectations for achievement, while providing the support necessary to meet that bar. You hold yourself to high expectations, modeling SPS values and seeking opportunities to continuously improve.
- Build authentic, caring relationships with colleagues, students, and families – You build strong relationships across students, families, and colleagues that are collaborative in nature and contribute to the individual and collective success of SPS. You partner with families and colleagues to make decisions in the best interest of students and learning.
- Embrace feedback – You are a reflective practitioner who learns from mistakes and challenges and uses them as opportunities for professional development. You model persistence and growth mindset and thrive in a culture of feedback.
Job Qualifications - Required:
Job Qualifications - Preferred:
- Experience in urban schools
- Experience working with diverse learners
- Demonstrated experience in Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) strategies strongly preferred
- Bilingual language proficiency (Spanish/English) strongly preferred
- Proficiency with technology (blended learning, teacher/family communication, Google G-Suite Apps, etc.) desirable.
- Current authorization to work in the United States
Work Year: Teachers in Salem Public Schools work a 185 day school year (180 student contact days plus 5 professional development days. Please visit www.salemk12.org to view the 2024-2025 district and/or school calendar.
Salary: Teacher salaries in the Salem Public Schools are determined by the Salem Teachers Union collective bargaining agreement. Salary information can be found in Appendix A. Use our new Salem Teacher Salary estimator here.
Benefits: The City of Salem offers Group Insurance Commission (GIC) benefits to all full-time employees. Click here for more information about our health benefits.
Equal Opportunity Employer
Salem Public School District is committed to maintaining a work and learning environment free from discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, pregnancy, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital/civil union status, ancestry, place of birth, age, citizenship status, veteran status, political affiliation, genetic information or disability, as defined and required by state and federal laws. Additionally, we prohibit retaliation against individuals who oppose such discrimination and harassment or who participate in an equal opportunity investigation.