ORT offers teachers top salaries in recruitment push

The ORT school network announced a campaign to recruit teachers by offering increased salaries. The campaign, set to last two months, aims to recruit some 150 “excellent” teachers to the school network by offering salaries that are some 20 percent to 40 percent higher than the industry average. According to the school network, to recruit leading teachers, there is a need to diversify the employment structure to incorporate research, as well as the development of curricula and teaching methodologies, in the training and mentoring roles of new teachers. As such, the network said the new teachers deserve to be rewarded for the added responsibilities and compensated accordingly. “As we have declared in the past, the ORT network advocates improving the quality of students’ matriculation exams and not only improvement in the percentage of eligibility for the matriculation certificates,” ORT Israel CEO Zvi Peleg said on Monday. “I believe that in order to improve the grades of students, there is a need to invest also in teachers, and therefore we are committed to significantly higher wages than what is acceptable in the public education system as of today,” he said. According to the school network, the professional teachers motivated by the new leading teachers will ensure a high level of teaching and lead to the improvement and achievements of the network’s students. The ORT school network is one of the leading educational networks of vocational schools in Israel, specializing in the hi-tech and science fields. It operates some 200 schools throughout the country, mostly in the periphery.