El Dorado School District Superintendent Jim Tucker speaks at Civitan.

EL DORADO — Jim Tucker, superintendent of the El Dorado School District, updated the El Dorado Civitan Club on two programs the district incorporated this year, and will continue to provide for the next school year.

Tucker has served in education for over 20 years. He received his bachelor’s degree from Southern Arkansas University and a master’s degree from Texas A&M.

He joined the El Dorado School District in 2006 as assistant principal at Barton Junior High School. He later served as principal at Retta Brown Elementary before being selected principal of El Dorado High School in 2011. He was promoted to deputy superintendent in 2013 and assumed the role of superintendent upon the retirement of Bob Watson in the summer of 2014.

This past school year, the El Dorado School District started a program called Teacher Leaders. They conducted a pilot of the program at El Dorado High School.

“A big thing in the state right now is teacher shortage,” Tucker said. “There are 50 percent less teachers in the state this year than there were five years ago.”

The Teacher Leader program consists of four teachers who have four to five years of experience. They are chosen to mentor first-year teachers at the El Dorado High School. The Teacher Leaders were assigned four to five teachers each, they had a few classes taken off of their load and they went through training classes. “These Teacher Leaders went through training all summer learning how to coach people, how to communicate with them and how to help them work through problems,” Tucker said. “We focus on strategies in the classroom, procedures with the students, classroom management and lesson planning.”

Not all new teachers were included in this new program, as it was just the pilot, but was deemed successful.

“We found that the teachers that had a Teacher Leader, have developed a lot better,” he said. “They developed more quickly and a lot more soundly and are doing a really good job in the classroom.”

Tucker plans to continue this program at the high school for one more year, then branch it out to other schools in the district.

Another successful program the district started last year is the Kinder Bash. Principals are responsible for assigning kindergarten students to their classrooms. Since all kindergarten students are new students, principals blindly place them in classes without knowing what level the students are at educationally.

The Kinder Bash is when kindergarten teachers come together during the summer to meet with incoming kindergarten students and their parents. The students go to one side of the room to be evaluated on their reading and their math, while parents go to the other side to learn information on the Promise, fill out lunch forms and receive school supplies and a ready pack.

There will be two Kinder Bash’s held this summer, one being July 27, in the El Dorado High School Common from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m., the second will be August 4, at St. Johns Baptist Church, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.