Enriching Education - Students become the teacher: educator shortages are producing home-grown solutions

 There’s an ancient saying, often attributed to Plato: Eventually, the student becomes the teacher.

 

Today, in some western Pennsylvania school districts, that notion is becoming far more than metaphor.

 

As the nationwide teacher shortage intensifies, innovative educators are increasingly seeing students in a new light: as their potential replacements.

 

Programs at a variety of Pittsburgh-region school districts are illustrating this ethos, creatively supporting the potential for kids to grow up, finish school, and train to be teachers in the very districts where they spent so much time as students. These districts are part of Future-Driven Schools, an alliance of Western Pennsylvania school districts that – with support from The Grable Foundation – are working to prepare every learner for tomorrow. Together, these districts help teachers, administrators, and board members do what they do best: innovate and collaborate in ways that benefit their students and communities.

 

The need is critical. Last school year, nearly 9,000 people across Pennsylvania left the teaching profession, reports the Post-Gazette. And many of those teachers aren’t being replaced: Over the past decade, “the number of teaching certificates issued by the commonwealth dropped by more than 60 percent,” reports Spotlight PA.

 

“We’ve got to start building our own teachers within our own system,” says Brandon Robinson, the superintendent at Jefferson-Morgan School District. “We’re building our own teaching staff for the future.”

 

The future teacher pipeline is evolving at Jefferson-Morgan. At their high school, the district’s administrative staff and teachers look to help every student choose an initial career path before they get to graduation day. In an effort to help students test out a potential teaching career, Robinson and his team decided to make the most of the proximity between their middle/high school building and their elementary school. Students can easily walk between the two, so the district lets interested high schoolers help out at the elementary school during their free period.

 

With more than 5,000 kids and a staff with many teachers approaching retirement, Hempfield Area School District faces a rather urgent challenge. Repopulating its corps of teachers will require robust measures, says Superintendent Mark Holtzman.

 

An innovative program at Hempfield Area is now tackling that challenge, and in the process, it is serving as direct inspiration for other districts in the Future-Driven Schools alliance.

 

A formal partnership with the Central Westmoreland Career and Technology Center, located right across the street from Hempfield Area’s Stanwood Elementary School, the program gives high-school juniors and seniors pre-education training and the chance to earn college credits toward their education degree. High-school students are being trained at Stanwood to work with kids in classrooms and help with after-school tutoring. They’re also getting solid training in education theory.

 

Not incidentally, this hometown training might help them consider eventually working at Hempfield Area as teachers once they finish college.

 

Other initiatives include the Keystone Oaks School District’s new Educators Rising program, preparing high school students for careers in education. And in the New Brighton Area School District, this year marked the beginning of a pilot program for aspiring teachers. High schoolers have the chance to help out elementary teachers and get a sense of what the teaching experience is really like.