The first week of May is National Teacher Appreciation Week. While every single person in our organization plays a critical role in supporting our students, schools and staff, research shows that teachers are the primary driver of student academic growth and achievement. More than academic programs, more than curriculum, more than facilities, more than athletics or clubs or district office staff, teachers make the difference for student academic achievement. That’s why, during Teacher Appreciation Week, we want to take time to recognize the unique and essential role our 450 teachers play in helping every student succeed.

As a community, we are privileged to have an incredibly dedicated, professional staff in the Roaring Fork Schools. And we can’t take that for granted. With teacher strikes happening around the state and increasing numbers of educators leaving the profession, I want to acknowledge that we ask a lot of our teachers and, simultaneously, they are undercompensated. But we can and must do something for our teachers so that we can secure strong schools for our community.

Here’s what’s at stake. Our strategic plan focuses on five priorities to strengthen student achievement: students first, rigorous learning for all, operational excellence, student-centered partnerships and thriving team. We have developed strategic initiatives, measurable outcomes and real-time tracking tools to drive and monitor our work. Despite the plan’s complexity, the core issue we must address is quite simple: We must strengthen every student’s ability to access rigorous, grade-level, or above, content every single day in every single classroom.

This challenge falls heavily on the shoulders of teachers. Yes, our teachers are expected to be experts in their academic content area. But the job is so much more than that. They are asked to cultivate classrooms to meet the social, emotional, cultural, academic and linguistic needs of an incredibly diverse student body. They must deeply understand the state of Colorado academic content areas of the subjects they teach, while also mastering the complexities of our curriculum, assessment tools and excellence standards. Our teachers are asked to recognize and intervene when students aren’t progressing. Our teachers are asked to regularly communicate with families, collaborate with peers, serve on leadership committees, commit to continuous professional development and possibly coach athletic teams, sponsor student clubs or partner with local organizations for additional learning opportunities. Teachers are asked to do all of this during an eight-hour day; it’s a lot to carry, and it matters deeply.

That’s why, as a district and community, we must do more than appreciate teachers and staff. We have to make real, substantive investments to support our teachers. We need to create structures that support their professional growth, enable meaningful collaboration and strengthen their ability to assess and support students. We must allow staff to stay focused on the most important work and not overburden them with additional tasks and initiatives. And we must be able to pay our teachers a competitive wage so that we can retain and recruit amazing people.

For nearly three decades, the Roaring Fork Schools have prioritized collaborative bargaining as a strategy to ensure that employees help create the solutions to address their needs. This process shifts traditional labor relations from contentious, adversarial negotiations to collaborative, solutions-based problem-solving.

We wrapped up this year’s collaborative bargaining process, which we call interest-based bargaining, just last week. This year, our shared interests were to strengthen salaries, ensure continuity of benefits, mitigate financial risk in a dynamic economic environment and prioritize teachers’ individual professional development goals and needs. We will bring the proposed solutions from this process to the Board of Education on April 29.

While we are proud of the collaborative work that happened this year, we are limited in how much we can accomplish due to financial factors outside our control. That’s why the Roaring Fork Schools are developing a proposal for a fall mill levy override to add local resources to these solutions, but we’ll need a wide range of strategies to address the many challenges we face.

There is no silver bullet to eliminating student academic achievement gaps. If there were, the more than 100,000 schools across this country would have solved it already. But ensuring we can retain and recruit high-quality teachers and then provide them with the time, resources, standards and support needed to meet students’ academic needs is essential.

Our teachers are capable of ensuring that every student develops the enduring knowledge, skills and character to thrive in a changing world. We just need to create the conditions for them to do this work.

Let’s celebrate and appreciate our teachers and staff next week, and commit to working together to sustain long-term success and positive student outcomes.