The Knox County Board of Education has approved an incentive plan to attract new special education teachers to the district to fill vacant positions.
Brook Dennard Rosser -- who oversees talent acquisition for the district -- said special education positions are some of the hardest positions to fill.
"Our hope there is that it puts us in a position to recruit beyond the East Tennessee region and be competitive," she said.
The plan would provide new special education teachers hired by Knox County Schools with a $7,000 signing incentive to stay with the school system that would be paid out over three years.
New teachers would receive $3,000 of the incentive in their first year, and then $2,000 their second and third years.
Teachers would need to stay with the district for all three years. If not, they will have to pay back the incentive money they received.
Rosser said enrollment in special education programs in many areas is down, making it difficult to find new teachers. She said it's also difficult for Knox County to attract and retain special education teachers due to smaller districts being able to offer larger starting salaries for those programs.
"We are a large county district, but we are surrounded by lots of smaller districts. And because of that structure, a lot of our surrounding districts are able to offer more in terms of a base salary," she said. "So this really puts us in a position to be able to offer something that's unique and different and that makes us really competitive with a lot of the districts that are in our area."
Some members of the school board discussed concerns about the incentives being unfair for other teachers who've been with the district. Rosser said it ultimately came down to a desire to fill a 'pretty significant number' of vacancies.
If the spots aren't filled, she said the vacant spots would likely need to be filled by outside contractors -- which they said would be a far more 'exorbitant' option in the end.
"The emphasis and focus for this program was to not spend more money, or money we don't have, to pay for contracted folks to fill those vacancies," she said.