Thanks so much to everyone who joined us for my webinar earlier this month on Snagging Talented ECE Teachers (and, of course, to Fran and her team at Early Childhood Investigations for making it happen, as well as our sponsor MyChild!).
Looking at the comments after the webinar, I'm sorry that some of you had problems with the audio coming from my end. I also wanted to follow up on a few questions/topics I didn't get to address fully during the webinar itself:
1. Religious programs. As I mentioned during the session, U.S. employers are generally prohibited by both state and federal law from asking job applicants about their religious affiliations (or lack thereof). Religious institutions, however - including religious schools - are allowed to use religion as a preferential factor in hiring. A Catholic school, for example, is allowed to ask applicants if they are Catholic and give preference to applicants who are.
This exception applies when a) religion is a "bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation" of the school; b) the school is wholly or substantially owned, controlled, or managed by a particular religious organization; or c) the curriculum is "directed toward the propagation of a particular religion."
If you're interested in wading through the relevant law, you can check it out here - scroll down to section (e). 2. How long to keep job applications. Two years is a good rule of thumb for applicants you don't wind up hiring; for those you hire, keep all records for the entire length of employment plus two years after the person stops working for you. You should keep all job applications, hiring documentation, and interview notes in a file specifically created for the particular job you were hiring for rather than in employees' personnel files. 3. Performance appraisal forms for early childhood teachers. If you do an online search for "performance review early childhood," you will turn up various forms in use by other programs, which you can refer to as samples and adapt to your needs. 4. Taking photos of job applicants to refer to later on. Just don't do it! Employers are not allowed to ask job applicants to provide photos of themselves. It's also a bad idea to take a photo of an applicant at the interview stage because it's hard to prove later on that you weren't doing it for an illegal reason. (You should be weighing candidates on the basis of their qualifications, not their photos.) Once you've made a job offer and the candidate has accepted, however, at that point it's fine to ask him or her to say "cheese" for the camera.
