If the Obama administration is looking for a how-to guide for federal stimulus spending, Fort Wayne Community Schools has created a good model. Rather than applying the $14 million it will receive over the next two years as a job Band-aid, the district is using the money to bolster achievement by reshaping instruction and intervention.

The plan doesn’t avert the pain of layoff notices. But it does give affected teachers a good opportunity to be rehired for jobs better aligned to student needs. State officials and other Indiana school districts should take note of the deliberate approach FWCS is taking and target their shares of stimulus money in the same way.

This month, the U.S. Department of Education released guidelines on how to use the $11 billion in Title I and special education money disbursed as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Identifying and using effective teachers as coaches constituted one directive; training teachers to use data to improve instruction was another.

Those are goals of the FWCS plan. It shifts classroom teacher positions now paid for out of the general fund to new jobs as student interventionists and instructional coaches, paid for with stimulus money. The stimulus money must be directed to special education students and to Title I schools primarily serving disadvantaged students.

In any event, the new jobs support a previously announced plan to restructure the district’s reading intervention program, extending it from the elementary schools through high school.

Layoffs would have happened with or without the reading program redesign. Superintendent Wendy Robinson noted that it would have been easier to simply cut jobs to bridge the budget shortfall created by declining interest income. But creating positions that directly help struggling students or help all teachers improve their instruction is the right thing to do, she said.

The stimulus money ends up filling two important roles: helping the district meet achievement goals and allowing the county’s largest employer to avoid cutting payroll.

Student achievement, not job retention, must be the primary objective in spending both the federal money and shrinking state dollars. The majority of teachers will agree, but some already are complaining about how FWCS’ restructuring will affect them. One, in an anonymous letter to the administration, complained about the addition of instructional coaches: “We don’t need a person in a building to tell teachers what to do.”

Those days are past, and any teacher who believes otherwise ignores economic reality. With public funding of schools comes accountability for results and improvement. Workers devastated by the recession will have no sympathy for any teacher unwilling to accept change, particularly when it has become painfully clear that we need graduates well equipped for a rapidly changing workforce.