Philadelphia School District is spending $620,000 just for this

(The Center Square) - The School District of Philadelphia wants to spend $620,950 for a media campaign to recruit teachers and school-based support staff.

The district will consider approval of the one-year contract with Magnum Integrated Marketing at its March 28 meeting. The contract would run from July 2024 through June 2025.

The district staff said the contract is necessary to recruit high-quality employees.

The school said it hires about 2,500 employees every year, including 800 to 1,000 new teachers and about 1,500 support staff in transportation, food services, facilities and other operations.

“In order to ensure a robust, diverse applicant pool to meet all projected hiring needs each year, the District utilizes a marketing agency that develops and executes a comprehensive paid media campaign to highlight the unique benefits of working at the District and to support recruitment in harder-to-fill and priority areas,” the district staff stated. “The resources needed to develop, implement, and continually monitor and refine the campaign in real time to meet the evolving needs of the district requires additional resources and capacity beyond that of current staff.”

The contract would be an extension of a previous deal with Magnum Integrated Marketing. Last year, the company attracted 47,000 visits to the districts Teach In Philly website and resulted in 12,000 application starts. The support-staff recruitment campaign resulted in 27,000 clicks to apply on the Work In Philly website.

The average salary of a Philadelphia school teacher in 2023 was $81,864, an increase of 15% since 2019. The average teacher salary was $71,077 in 2019, the year before the pandemic.