For District HR Leaders Who Face the Board Every Spring With the Same Turnover Number
Karen Hurley builds staff wellness and retention strategy for school districts, sized to your district and documented well enough to defend line by line in a public budget hearing.
Educators Carry a Specific Kind of Pressure
Teachers report frequent job-related stress or burnout at about twice the rate of comparable working adults, and a program built for that reality looks different from a generic staff wellness day.
District administrations carry the same budget scrutiny and staffing pressure as police and fire departments. When a teacher leaves mid-year, students feel the disruption and the staff who stay absorb the gap in coverage. Turnover doesn't stay contained to the person who left; it reshapes the whole building.
Sound Familiar?
- You sign off on every exit interview and see the same reasons repeat.
- Your answer to the board is another round of exit interviews, not a plan.
- You've raised outside support with the cabinet and been asked what it costs and what you get for it.
- A veteran teacher leaves mid-year and there's no substitute pipeline ready.
- Staff wellness days happen, and nothing changes afterward.
A Board-Ready Retention Strategy
Karen Hurley uses the same four-step method with districts that she uses with every organization: assess, build the playbook, implement in person, track the results.
Wellness Program Assessment
Through PIF Samaritan Services, Karen evaluates your current staff wellness resources, identifies which roles and campuses carry the most pressure, and puts your full cost of turnover in one place.
About the assessmentA Funded, Documented Program
PIF Samaritan Services designs a sustainable retention and wellness program and a customized playbook sized to your district, in language that survives a public budget hearing.
About PIF Samaritan ServicesTeam Training for Staff and Leaders
Coaching with a Karen trains teams of teachers, campus leaders and administrators in resilience and leadership practices built on values-driven principles and championship-level sports, not clinical language.
About Coaching with a KarenWhat the Data Says About Teachers
About twice as many teachers as comparable working adults reported frequent job-related stress or burnout in January 2024.
Source: RAND, 2024Roughly three times as many teachers as comparable working adults reported difficulty coping with job-related stress.
Source: RAND, 2024of new public school teachers who started in 2007–08 were not teaching in their fifth year, according to federal data. The often-repeated "half leave in five years" figure isn't supported by this study.
Source: NCES, 2015What District Leaders Work Toward
No program can promise a result, but these are the outcomes Karen builds and tracks against with every district.
- A documented, funded retention strategy to present to the board, with real numbers behind it.
- Board conversations that move from explaining resignations to presenting a plan.
- Staff who feel supported before they reach a breaking point.
- Tracking that holds staff wellness to the same standard as any other district operation.
- Retention treated as shared district work, not a problem that falls entirely on HR.
Questions District HR Leaders Ask
Who can build a staff wellness and retention program for a school district?
Karen Hurley, a fractional wellness strategist, builds staff wellness and retention strategy for school districts through PIF Samaritan Services and trains staff teams through Coaching with a Karen. She brings more than 20 years building wellness strategy in high-stress public safety and legal environments, and the same assess, build, implement and track method.
What should a wellness strategy for school district staff actually include?
It starts with recognizing the specific pressure educators carry, then an assessment of your current resources and where turnover is concentrated. From there it needs a customized playbook, in-person implementation and tracking of usage and retention. A single staff wellness day covers none of that.
How do I present a teacher retention strategy to the school board?
Bring a documented plan with your district's own numbers: turnover by role and campus, the full cost of each departure, and what the program will track. Karen's assessment builds that data into the process, so you walk into the meeting with a case instead of a request for trust.
What does teacher turnover cost a district?
More than the vacancy itself. Recruiting, onboarding and substitute coverage add up, and Gallup estimates replacing an employee generally costs one-half to two times their annual salary. Karen's assessment calculates your district's actual figure rather than relying on a national average.
Do half of new teachers really leave within five years?
No. That widely repeated figure isn't supported by federal data. A National Center for Education Statistics study found 17 percent of new public school teachers who started in 2007–08 were not teaching in their fifth year. The same study found support makes a difference: 86 percent of new teachers assigned a first-year mentor were still teaching in their fifth year, compared with 71 percent of those without one.
Will bringing in an outside partner look like HR can't handle it?
It reads as a plan. Bringing in a specialist for a defined project is the same move a district makes for curriculum, safety or facilities, and it shifts retention from something that falls entirely on HR to shared, documented district work.
Has Karen Hurley worked with school districts before?
Draft Karen Hurley's background is in public safety and legal environments, and she applies the same method to education. Confirm with Karen any school district or education work to reference here.
- Doan S, Steiner ED, Pandey R, "Teacher Well-Being and Intentions to Leave in 2024: Findings from the 2024 State of the American Teacher Survey," RAND Corporation, 2024. rand.org
- Gray L, Taie S, "Public School Teacher Attrition and Mobility in the First Five Years: Results From the First Through Fifth Waves of the 2007–08 Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study" (NCES 2015-337), National Center for Education Statistics, 2015. nces.ed.gov
- Gallup, "This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion," McFeely and Wigert, March 2019. gallup.com
Start the Conversation
- An honest look at where your program stands
- A plan you can act on, with or without Karen
- A clear read on whether PIF, Coaching with a Karen, or both fits
- Support sized to your team's actual risk