Teacher apprenticeship program helps districts address shortage
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Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
Matt Rhoda needs to hire around 30 teachers each year — significant turnover for small town Frankfort Schools and his staff of just over 200 educators, but something he's hoping will change.
The big picture: Schools around the state — and the country — have been facing a shortage of qualified teachers for years.
- Fewer people are going into the profession and more are leaving it, driven away by challenges like low and stagnant wages and, increasingly, difficult working conditions.
- More than 1,000 teaching positions are regularly listed on the Indiana Department of Education's hiring page. Even during the school year, hundreds of positions go unfilled.
Driving the news: To help address the problem, the U.S. Department of Labor added "K-12 teacher" to the list of apprenticeship-eligible occupations in 2021, allowing schools access to workforce development dollars for teacher training.
- Last year, the department approved IU as a registered apprenticeship program sponsor, and several of its regional campuses began looking for school districts to host teaching apprentices — people who work in the school district while completing their teacher training through IU.
Zoom in: Frankfort Community Schools was the first to jump on board.
- Keeping teachers is especially tough for small, rural districts like Frankfort, where Rhoda is superintendent.
- About half of his staff drives in from other counties, he said, and he often loses them when jobs open up closer to home.
- Frankfort also struggles to compete with neighboring districts that can afford higher salaries.
What they're saying: The "grow your own" aspect of the apprenticeship program appealed to Rhoda.
- "These are people who live in this community, want to invest in this community," he said. "They're sending their kids here."
They're people like Amber Shirar.
- All three of Shirar's kids attended Suncrest Elementary, where she's worked as a paraprofessional in pre-kindergarten classrooms for the last four years.
- That experience gave her a new appreciation for how bad the teacher shortage is and the impact it has on students and schools.
- "As a parent, you see … OK, my kid has a new teacher," Shirar said. "But when you're working inside the building, you see the actual turnover and the teachers coming in fresh out of college."
How it works: Shirar, 45, is one of six Frankfort paraprofessionals enrolled in the apprenticeship program through IU Kokomo.
- They work full time in their schools while doing the coursework, mostly online, to receive their teacher certification.
- It's a four-year program, though how long it takes depends on how many classes each apprentice takes at a time and if they had any college credit coming into the program.
- The apprenticeship grant covers the cost of the coursework, provides each participant with a mentor and guarantees them a pay bump — 3% for Frankfort's apprentices — halfway through the program.
- Each school district can have up to 10 apprentices in the program. Rhoda told Axios he's vetting interested applicants to fill his four remaining spots.
What's next: Leah Nellis, IU assistant vice president for school partnerships, said 10 more districts are joining the program.
- They could have as many as 100 teaching apprentices working toward their degrees next year.
The bottom line: Nellis said she expects the program will grow as long as the grant dollars are available.
- "We knew our districts had incredible need," Nellis said. "This is a way for districts to grow their own … in a way that recognizes there are a lot of individuals already committed to working in schools, working with kids … but they need to continue working while getting their teaching license."