Originally Posted by WillCAD

That was my understanding as well, but do the math.

I recall seeing an article mentioned recently that TSA wants to hire as many as 2,000 new screeners this year, while the average over the last few years was something like 1,200.

1,200 new hires per year out of a work force of 60,000 is about two percent. Even their goal this year of 2,000 equates to only 3.3% of 60,000. To me, that's a small percentage being sent to the academy. Or am I remembering the total work force number incorrectly? That could skew my perception.



My hope for the academy was not that every TSO would attend it, but that it would be used to train the trainers. Instead of a screener training course, the academy should be a screener trainer training course, turning out uniformly trained instructors who would then return to their home airports and hold classes to properly retrain the entire workforce. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't seem to have happened, and TSOs who learn things at the academy return to their home airports and are most likely told, "Well, I don't care what you learned at the academy, we do it different here!"