This time next week, school buildings across Monongalia County will be thrumming with activity as students file in for the start of the 2024-25 academic year.
Look for that same energy from the people in front of the classroom, also, Mon Schools Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr., said Monday.
Mon’s district is starting the new year with a nearly full roster of educators, the superintendent said.
“Right now, we’ve got seven teaching positions that are still posted,” he said, “so we’re in pretty good shape.”
As of Monday, there were four openings for pre-kindergarten teachers certified in special needs education, Campbell said, along with two other middle school teacher openings — plus another high school guidance counselor position as yet to be filled.
In the meantime, the district also just finished up its annual orientation, where 65 new hires were welcomed.
Campbell also plans on recommending an additional 20 more hires for fall during Tuesday night’s Board of Education meeting.
Meanwhile, the state Board of Education is expected this week to open more classroom portals to budding educators enrolled in its Grow Your Own West Virginia Teaching Pathway.
West Virginia’s state BOE wants to allow enrollees in the program the right to work as substitute teachers in elementary and middle school classrooms — provided they’ve earned an associate degree or completed 60 college-credit hours in the course of their studies, among other benchmarks.
The board meets Wednesday in Charleston.
Campbell said Mon is more fortunate, in that the local district doesn’t face the same hiring challenges as some of its neighbors in the Mountain State.
“Challenge,” is the watch-word, Carla Warren told The Dominion Post previously.
Warren, a former classroom teacher who now directs development and support services across West Virginia for the state education department, gave a breakdown to those challenges in January, before the start of 2023 Legislative session.
In 2015 in West Virginia, she mapped out, some 600 technically non-certified teachers were in front of public-school classrooms.
That number has now since more than doubled, she said, with 1,544 such educators doling out the lesson plans for the next generation of students coming up.
“We have certified teachers,” she said, “but they’re teaching out of their content area.”
And as current teachers face retirement or ponder a career change, there just aren’t as many in the back row ready to assume a role in the front of the classroom, Warren said.
There are 18 teacher preparation programs in colleges and universities across West Virginia, and taking roll in them, she said, is easy.
Too easy.
Nine of those 18 programs graduated less than 20 teachers last year, she said.
Six of them, she reported, graduated 10 or less.
Three of those programs didn’t have one soon-to-be teacher turning his tassel at commencement, Warren said.
Engaged teachers mean engaged students, Warren said, and the homegrown initiative is designed to do just that: to keep newly minted educators from jumping over the border to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland or Virginia to do their work.
Everyone benefits, she said, every time there’s a professionally trained, certified teacher in front of a classroom.
There’s something else, too, she said.
Engaged students, in many cases, want to keep being in classrooms after high school. Educated professionals, she said, just might want to stay and work for the benefit of their home state.
“This isn’t an ‘education’ problem, she said. “It’s a workforce development problem.”
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