When Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’ running mate earlier this month, his ascendancy helped to elevate the idea of educators serving in public office.

Walz, who served several terms in Congress before becoming the governor of Minnesota in 2018, is a former high school social studies teacher and football coach who, to this day, holds those identities close. Come January 2025, depending on the outcome of the election, he could be moving to Washington, D.C., to serve as vice president of the United States.

Though Walz is squarely in the spotlight during this election, a number of other educators are seeking public office this year, many for the first time.

In many ways, politics is an obvious and natural progression for educators, teacher-candidates and political scientists say.

This summer, EdSurge spoke with five individuals running for election — three classroom teachers, one superintendent and an early childhood advocate — about their motivations and the skills and experiences that would set them up for success in office, if elected in November.

Once a Public Servant, Always a Public Servant

Plenty of former educators hold public office today, including at the federal level, such as Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, a former preschool teacher, and Rep. Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, a former high school history and government teacher.

The step from public teacher to public office holder is, for many, intuitive, says Kelly Siegel-Stechler, a senior researcher at Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

“They’re already public servants,” Siegel-Stechler points out. “They have a lot of insight and experience in how to navigate some of the challenges that go along with large public institutions and the processes that make government happen.”

Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor of political science and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, adds that individuals who prioritize public service and volunteerism are more likely to engage with civic and political organizations.

Arguably the highest form of service is to teach every day.

— Jonathan Collins

“It’s the involvement in those networks that tends to catapult people into the process of running for office,” Collins says. “Think about teachers and teachers’ unions, about what a teacher does on an everyday basis. Arguably the highest form of service is to teach every day.”

Chad King Wilson Sr. is a high school alternative education and social studies teacher in Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. He’s running for a seat on the Frederick County Board of Education this November.

Teachers, Wilson says, understand that their role — with students, with families, in a community — has a certain power and, with it, demands a certain responsibility.

“In politics today, the decisions our elected officials make affect our lives — sometimes in small ways, sometimes big,” he says. “Educators have a service mindset and a duty of care in everything they do. That serves you well in any elected position, because you’re already serving. You’re a public servant, [asking], ‘How can I uplift you? How can I get you where you need to be?’”

Education Is Inherently Political — Even More So Today

Between the pandemic, which led to divisive and prolonged school closures, and the increasing politicization of education — from book bans to discussions of gender identity and legislation about what can be taught or said in a classroom — many teachers feel vilified.

“Teachers have found themselves under intense scrutiny in recent years, and that has really made them staunch advocates,” says Siegel-Stechler of Tufts. “When you feel like you are asked to justify and asked to uphold your values, that can lead you to want to make big changes.”

A few conditions must be in place for someone to run for office, adds Collins of Columbia. Once you account for access to resources and connections, the most important factor is being energized.

“You could argue no professional has had reasons to be as fired up over the last few years as teachers,” he says. “Teachers have been showing that they are fed up for quite a while. It’s the people who get fed up who tend to see politics as that next step as well.”

Especially when teachers feel that the conversations being had and decisions being made about them and their students don’t reflect reality, that can inspire some to run.

Numerous candidates noted that their school boards and state legislatures lack representation from people who have knowledge and understanding about schools today.

“You don’t have a lot of people [in office] who are still in front of students, working inside of schools, who know this because they live it every day,” says Wilson. “That gave me the nudge to go over the line: ‘I’ve gotta step up.’”

Sarah Marzilli is an elementary school art teacher who was running for a seat on the school board in Volusia County, Florida, but recently lost her primary. She feels that, with the pace of change in schools today — from social media and cellphone use to the growing challenges around mental health — school boards need representation from current educators.

“We need to make sure we have someone who’s in the trenches, so to speak,” Marzilli says, “not an outsider looking in on it.”

Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell, a longtime Spanish teacher and current substitute teacher who is running for a seat in the Kentucky state legislature, notes that because a lot of legislators are lawyers, they can have unrealistic expectations about how quickly change happens in education.

“When they talk about education, they talk as if you can snap your fingers and have something done,” Cottrell says. “As teachers, we know the amount of time it takes. We know more about the initiatives that look good on paper but won’t actually move the needle. … We’re results-driven.”

While tuning in to a recent public committee hearing about the growing population of English language learners in Kentucky schools, Cottrell was appalled by committee members’ ignorance about basic education codes. “I wanted to jump through the screen,” she recalls. “No one knows what they’re talking about. … They’re not even asking the right questions.”

Susie Hedalen is currently the superintendent of Montana’s Townsend Public School District and running to be Montana’s next superintendent of public instruction. Hedalen has worked as a teacher, a principal and a superintendent at districts of varying sizes in Montana.

“I’m living it every day,” Hedalen says. “I know what our challenges are. I know what school leaders feel like they need and how the state could support leaders as well as teachers. I get to work with students and families every day and really have a pulse on what’s happening in education in Montana right now.”

A Bevy of Transferable Skills

Educators tend to possess a set of skills that lend themselves well to public office, many people pointed out.

For one, teachers are often effective communicators to different audiences, be it students, families or administrators. They can communicate well one-on-one but also to large groups.

Teachers are practiced decision-makers, too.

“They make a lot of hard decisions every single day,” Siegel-Stechler says. “Alone in a class with 20 to 30 kids, they have to be able to make good decisions on the fly.”

Educators are often good listeners. They are trusted members in their communities. They get along well with people who have a range of personalities and opinions. They have a certain comfort level with public speaking. And they tend to be disciplined. Those are all qualities that came up during interviews.

Educators are usually empathetic too, Collins says, noting that empathy is a quality missing from our politics today.

“In order to be an effective teacher, you have to be able to empathize with students — not judge them based on preconceived ideas, understand the humanity and dignity of each child and how to maximize their potential,” he says.

Educators Take a Seat at the Table

The two candidates who are running for seats in their state legislatures — Cottrell from Kentucky and Safiyah Jackson from North Carolina — both noted that the electoral system is stacked against people like them.

“If you’re an educator with educator friends, or a Black woman with Black friends, it makes fundraising very difficult,” says Jackson, an early childhood advocate and chief strategy officer at the North Carolina Partnership for Children. “If you’re a lawyer with lawyer friends, bam. It’s a system designed to deliver exactly as it’s delivering.”

It takes a lot of time and money and social connections to run and win a campaign, Cottrell says. That’s not very practical if you’re a full-time employee earning regular wages.

“I would love to see more teachers run for office and be empowered to do that,” Cottrell says, “but that’s really, really difficult under the work burden they have.” (Cottrell is not teaching full-time right now.)

The result, she says, is a body of legislators that does not include many people with “boots on the ground, who are getting their hands dirty in the work.”

Cottrell understands that not every educator can or wants to run for office. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be involved in the process of politics in some way. They might consider alternatives like asking to testify before a committee or offering to work with their representatives on legislation pertaining to education.

“The more teachers are involved in the process, the better relationship there will be between the statehouse and schools,” Cottrell says. “That can only benefit the kids.”

© Frame Stock Footage / Shutterstock

As someone who views cooking and baking as hobbies, not chores, I follow a lot of food bloggers and recipe developers on social media. I subscribe to many of their newsletters. I, well, make and eat a lot of their food.

Yet I’ve only come across one who devotes back-to-school season to easing the financial burden on educators.

Deb Perelman, the best-selling author and food blogger behind Smitten Kitchen, has been running the Classroom Wishlist Project for three years now. Each summer, she creates a post on her Instagram account (1.8 million followers) welcoming teachers to share their school supply lists, along with a bit of humanizing information like where they live and what they teach, in a Google form.

Then Perelman puts their responses in a spreadsheet, which as of mid-August has over 730 entries for the 2024-25 school year, and invites her expansive reader community to visit a teacher’s wish list and purchase what they can so that these educators don’t have to pay out of their pockets.

The average teacher, according to the nonprofit DonorsChoose, spends close to $700 of their own money on classroom supplies in a given year — a reality that “feels all wrong and makes me sad,” Perelman says in the Classroom Wishlist Project description.

The famous food writer lives in Manhattan and has children entering fourth and 10th grade this year. There are all sorts of causes and issues she could support. Why, I wondered, did she choose this one?

I recently got to ask Perelman that myself, along with other questions — like what has most surprised her about the endeavor and what recipe on her site most says “back to school.”

She is quick to note that the wish list project, which she finds gratifying and heartening, does not require major sacrifice on her part.

“I almost feel guilty, sometimes, about what a low lift this project is for me,” she admits. “I would do it if it was harder, [but] I feel like I have to be honest — I'm not sweating over this.”

She adds: “It's more a reflection of the generosity of the community, and the kindness. This is not about me doing anything special. I'm really just using a space I've already created to bounce the light back to people who need it.”

The following interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

EdSurge: When and how did the Classroom Wishlist Project first begin?

Deb Perelman: This is the third summer, so I guess that means that it began in — what year is this? — 2022.

A reader messaged me, and she said her daughter was a school teacher, and [the school] had given her no budget for classroom supplies. She asked: Would I mind sharing her classroom wish list with my readers and getting the word out?

It feels good. I think everybody wins. I love the idea of supporting teachers.

— Deb Perelman

And when I did, they wiped out her wish list in, I feel like, under a day. The generosity was just staggering. And I heard from a lot of other teachers who asked if I could help them, too. I thought, ‘Yes, why not? Let's just do this.’

The first summer, it was not the most organized. Like, people would [direct message] me their list, and I would share it in a spreadsheet. By the second summer, which was last summer, I knew I was going to do this as a project, hopefully every year.

I created a Google Form where teachers could submit their list, and asked them to tell us a little bit about their classroom and to tell us what city they’re in. I think that helps a lot because sometimes you might read, like, ‘Oh, it's a music classroom. I love music,’ or, ‘Oh, that's my town.’ So it's more meaningful for people to have a little more information when there are so many [lists].

Doing it that way, we got a lot, a lot, a lot more submissions — like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And I worried — and I still worry — that we get too many submissions to make any meaningful difference. If it's 20 lists, we're going to wipe them out. But I can't promise that for 900 lists at all — or even close.

But the thing I forget is that, if you need stuff and a stranger sends you even a quarter of it or one [item], it still just completely makes your day. Whether you just got the crayons or just got 10 books, it doesn't matter. There's no way it's not well received, even if it's not everything people need.

Photo courtesy of Deb Perelman

I imagine people receiving and giving appreciate the humanity of it.

Yeah, I think it feels good on both sides. And I think it feels really fun to buy books and crayons for classrooms. I love buying school supplies.

I have two kids, and they're both in public school. When they first started in their elementary school, we would get [a list] from the teachers at the beginning of the year, ‘Here's some stuff we could use for the classroom, bring it in if you can.’ And then, as the fundraising improved at the public school, the PTA was able to bring in more money. We no longer have to buy any school supplies at all, and it really is such a privilege. I mean, we don't even buy a single box of crayons. It's just — it's crazy.

We got very lucky. … And like I said, I think it's so fun to buy crayons and books and whatever for a classroom. It feels really good.

That's a very organic start. Do you often get reader emails of people asking for you to support a cause?

Not as often as I would expect, but maybe I'm not that on top of my email.

Photo courtesy of Deb Perelman

One of the dark Smitten Kitchen secrets is that I have no staff, just sort of a very, very, very part-time assistant. I'm just like a do-it-myself person, which is good and bad. So I wouldn't say this happens a ton, but I liked this one. It feels good. I think everybody wins. I love the idea of supporting teachers.

The things that these teachers need are often so basic. These are small, inexpensive purchases that can really make somebody’s day. And then I get these lovely notes back from them. It’s just the joy, the incandescent joy, from people who walk into their classroom and find that a complete stranger bought all the glue they needed for the year. Or somebody sent me this picture of — it must be 50 books for her classroom. Somebody bought basically every book on her list, and she walked into her classroom and it was there.

How do the teachers find you? Are they often readers in your online community?

Usually. I mostly do the shoutout through Instagram, where I have my largest social community. I have a website too, but I almost try to funnel it down a little bit. It's either somebody who reads the site, or it might be their kid or their friend. I was trying to keep it from being too wide and too open on the internet, because otherwise we'll just get 10,000 wish lists and nothing will get filled.

But I also like the idea, if I can get a part-time staff person next summer, of trying to expand it a little bit more. Like maybe I can get some people to sponsor or match wish list clearing. I just don't have, personally, the bandwidth to dig into that right now.

Is there any teacher this year or in past years whose story stands out to you?

Oh, my goodness, there have been so many.

I remember last summer, after the wildfires in Hawaii, there were people who were looking specifically for the lists from those teachers [on Maui].

Especially when there's been some sort of tragedy or weather disaster, and it's been in the news and teachers don't even know how they're going to start their school year, I think there's definitely a lot of focus on that. There's definitely an interest in helping in such a specific way — where what you're doing is going to directly affect a kid's education and how their year goes. It feels like the most satisfying giving in that way.

Is there a request that has been especially frequent or something that surprises you when you look through these wish lists?

I think the thing that [is most surprising] is just that so much of how a school thrives depends on the way we do funding. And I am not a national expert on education in any way … but so much of it comes from crowdsourced fundraising and not out of the money schools get from the state for students.

In a lot of places, parents don't have extra money to give. And then there's other places where parents are writing $500 checks or more to the PTA every year, and it's just crazy how much that changes a kid's education.

If you're in an area where parents don't have deep pockets and a lot of spare change, why should the kids' classrooms not have what they need? Why should that affect whether they have enough crayons? It's wild when you think of it that way.

That's what's been eye-opening for me. I've also heard from so many retired teachers and older teachers who are like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I must have spent $2,000 a year from my own paycheck. This is so nice that people want to help out.’ People don't see this money that the teachers are spending. It's invisible.

Do you measure success by dollars raised or wish lists cleared, or are you measuring it at all?

I'm actually not measuring it at all. … I do use the thank you notes as a good measure of how it's being received and the joy. You can always just see the joy.

Final question: What recipe on your website is the most quintessential ‘back to school’ recipe?

I think homemade Oreos have got to be it, right? I mean, of course. It's either going to be grilled cheese and tomato soup — a kid-friendly meal — or it's going to be homemade Oreos. They’re really easy: It’s like two chocolate sugar cookies with vanilla in them. They’re really fun.

© Anna Bova / Shutterstock

2023 was the hottest year ever recorded on the planet — by far. More than halfway in, 2024 is on track to exceed it, with July the hottest month on record and July 22 the hottest day.

Everyone is feeling it — energy bills are up, social plans are disrupted, sleep and exercise are more elusive. In early care and education, children and caregivers are finding that it’s disrupting their everyday routines and experiences.

“The heat is different this year for us,” says Tessie Ragan, owner of Perfect Start Learning, a licensed home-based child care program in Rosamond, California, which she describes as the “desert part” of the state.

By the end of June, temperatures regularly approached or exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit in her Southern California community.

Although Ragan runs a nature-based summer camp for 3- to 6-year-olds, the weather made it impossible for them to be outside some days.

“It’s just too hot for them,” she concedes. “Some of the kids started breathing heavy. It just made it miserable for them to be outside.”

Without a shade structure or heat-resistant playground equipment, much of Tessie Ragan's backyard is unsafe for children in her program during the hottest weeks of the summer. Photo courtesy of Ragan.

Extreme heat can be dangerous for anyone, but it’s especially troubling for young children.

Children under age 5 are physically more susceptible to the negative effects of extreme heat, explains Allie Schneider, an early childhood education policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank that recently published a report on the topic.

Our sector is not prepared for this.

— Angie Garling

Little kids’ bodies heat up faster and cool down slower. They have fewer sweat glands. And any hit to their sleep or concentration can have a deleterious effect on their learning and development, Schneider says. Plus, when temperatures are up, air quality tends to go down, which is also worse for kids, who inhale and exhale about twice as often as adults.

As temperatures trend upward, already-hot places like Rosamond are getting hotter, while more temperate regions that have long escaped a need for indoor air conditioning and outdoor heat-mitigation systems are now having to adjust to a new normal.

That’s putting a strain on early care and education programs, which are responsible — first and foremost — for keeping kids safe and healthy, but seldom have access to the funds needed to add or upgrade heat-mitigation systems.

“They absolutely do not have the infrastructure that they need,” says Angie Garling, senior vice president of early care and education at Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF), a national community development financial institution with an early care and education team focused on investing in the child care ecosystem. “Our sector is not prepared for this.”

Garling often hears from child care providers, whose messages boil down to this: “I know about kids. I know what I need for kids. Somebody needs to help me figure out the rest.”

Providers want support figuring out how to navigate, prioritize and afford solutions like solar panels and HVAC systems.

“They’re also very cost conscious, because they’re severely underpaid and under-reimbursed,” Garling adds.

Ragan has been running her summer camp for years. She used to start it after her program’s school year ended in May, with camp running for six weeks, from the first of June to mid-July.

A few years ago, grappling with extreme heat that had become “insane,” she had to reconsider her approach.

“We could not be comfortable or safe outside,” Ragan recalls. She says she was scared for the kids. “They all started turning bright red. No matter how much water I gave them. … They slowed down and weren’t enjoying themselves.”

She adds: “It made it impossible for us to have actual, meaningful summer camp activities.”

The plastic play equipment would get so hot it could burn a child’s skin. The overhang on her house only extended so far, leaving much of the backyard exposed to the sun. She couldn’t afford to buy a misting system or a larger shade structure or wooden playground equipment — all thousands of dollars apiece — to ease the situation.

The roof on Tessie Ragan's home covers a portion of the backyard, offering kids in her program a shaded patio. But the sun-exposed area is often too hot for children. Photo courtesy of Ragan.

“It didn’t seem like it was in the children’s best interest for me to run the summer camp [if] we didn’t have the ability to be outside as much as they need to be outside,” says Ragan, who talks about the importance of outdoor play for kids’ gross motor development.

She decided to abbreviate camp going forward, wrapping up at the end of June. That meant losing two weeks of income, but it would allow her to cut out two of the hottest weeks of the summer.

Ragan made a personal sacrifice to prioritize children’s health. As a provider, she knows what signs to look out for and when kids might be reaching their limit.

Because young children are less able to recognize and communicate when they are experiencing symptoms of heat exhaustion, it falls to the caregivers in their lives to notice and respond.

That is an important but tricky responsibility, says Schneider, since there is no standardized guidance for caregivers. Some pediatricians say that anything above 85 degrees could harm a child’s health, she notes, but it’s difficult to pinpoint a single temperature, since humidity, sun exposure and exertion are factors to consider.

Still, Schneider believes clear guidance is both achievable and necessary for early childhood programs and providers in the near term, but she stops short of saying there should be any requirements around it.

“One hesitation we have about including a specific, enforceable requirement in child care licensing programs, is that it does present a financial barrier for providers who are already operating on very thin margins,” she explains.

Garling, at LIIF Fund, agrees — and believes that’s why early childhood should be prioritized for climate adaptations. These include outdoor improvements such as heat-resistant play equipment, misting systems, trees, solar panels and shade structures, as well as indoor upgrades like insulated windows, air purifiers and electric HVAC systems.

“Businesses can benefit, and therefore children can benefit,” Garling says. “Children can be inside in a healthy way, and they can be outside.”

We’re worried about paying our bills, paying our staff. It leaves very little — almost nothing — to save for something like this.

— Nancy Harvey

Nancy Harvey, a home-based provider in Oakland, California, has welcomed some climate adaptations in her home over the last year.

With the help of a grant from LIIF, Harvey was able to replace an outdated heating system and get air conditioning in her home for the first time. (That grant is part of the work LIIF is managing on behalf of the state of California to help about 4,000 providers expand and improve their physical spaces.)

Oakland doesn’t experience some of the extreme temperatures that many other parts of the country do, Harvey acknowledges, but it can still get up into the 90s in the summer and down to the 40s in the winter.

Last October, Harvey got a ductless mini-split heat pump installed in the ceiling on the first floor of her home. The placement alone is a huge relief, she says, since her old system was a wall heater that she always feared a child would burn themselves on (she had a plastic lattice cover on it for safety, but says: “Has that ever stopped a child?”)

With the help of a grant, Nancy Harvey received a new energy-efficient ductless mini-split heat pump, making her house more comfortable during winter and summer. Photo courtesy of LIIF.

The new system has made the inside of Harvey’s house more comfortable during both winter and summer, she says.

“This is a learning environment,” she emphasizes. “[Now], we don’t have to worry. It enables the children to focus and have a better educational environment.”

Without the grant, she never would have been able to afford these upgrades, Harvey says.

“We don’t have enough funding. We’re worried about paying our bills, paying our staff,” she says. “It leaves very little — almost nothing — to save for something like this.”

Extreme heat can cause real, serious health effects, especially for children with asthma and other respiratory issues. But many people are quick to point out that, when it’s too hot for children to be outside, they are also denied key gross motor development opportunities and quintessential experiences of being a kid.

“Children this age — they love outdoor play,” says Harvey. “They thrive on it. It is certainly a very big disappointment when they can’t go outside and breathe in clean air, fresh air.”

Harvey has woven numerous outdoor activities into her program, from painting outside to riding bicycles to setting up a “castle” they can play in.

When they're stuck inside — due to extreme temperatures or bad air quality from wildfire smoke — “they miss all of that,” she says. “Those are important developmental activities that they’re not able to enjoy when we’re forced to be inside.”

© K2L Family / Shutterstock

Tiaja Gundy was just 19 years old when she started working at Federal Hill House, an early learning center in Providence, Rhode Island. It was 2016, and back then, she lacked experience and expertise working with young children. She had no intention of staying in the field long-term.

This story also appeared in The 19th.

But the work grew on her. Gundy started out as a “floater,” helping with infants, toddlers and preschoolers as needed. She found she loved being around children.

As years passed, Gundy gained experience, and she moved into an assistant teaching position in a toddler classroom. Yet she was still missing some of the critical knowledge about child development that would allow her to continue growing in her career.

In 2021, Gundy recalls, one of her supervisors pulled her aside, and said, “You’re very promising. I know you can go farther in this field,” then told her about an interesting opportunity.

Rhode Island was launching a registered apprenticeship program for early childhood educators. With her employer’s support, Gundy would get to continue her paid teaching job as she took college courses, pursuing a Child Development Associate (CDA), a nationally recognized credential for those who work in early care and education settings. It would set her up to one day become a lead teacher. The apprenticeship would come with guaranteed wage increases, too.

Tiaja Gundy, a toddler teacher in Providence, Rhode Island.

The thought of balancing both work and school again was daunting, Gundy admits, but she was encouraged by her colleagues and excited to deepen her understanding of early childhood education. She decided to apply.

For decades, apprenticeship has been a popular career pathway for occupations such as electricians, plumbers and carpenters. In early care and education, however, there was limited uptake of the model.

Recently, that has changed — and fast. A decade ago, only a handful of states had registered apprenticeship programs in early childhood education. Five years ago, that had risen to about a dozen. As of last year, 35 states had an apprenticeship program for child care and early childhood education, and another seven states were developing them, according to a report published by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC).

In 2021, the last year for which there is available data, early childhood education was one of the five fastest-growing occupations for apprenticeship, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

“There’s just been an explosion,” says Linda Smith, who authored the BPC’s apprenticeship report last summer and has since joined the Buffett Early Childhood Institute as director of policy. “It is happening all over this country.”

Explaining the ‘Explosion’

Smith sees at least two reasons for the emergence and rapid growth of this model in early childhood education.

The first is that more federal funding has become available in recent years. At least 10 states are using American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars to build or expand their child care apprenticeship programs, and 13 are using Preschool Development Grant Birth Through Five funds. As many as 15 states are using money from the Child Care and Development Fund, which received a $15 billion boost under ARPA.

The second reason is that there is increased awareness of how essential and how endangered the early care and education sector is.

“We’re in a tough spot right now with child care in this country,” Smith says soberly. “We have a workforce problem on our hands. Everyone is crying for child care workers. They can’t fill jobs. Wages are low. Child care programs can’t compete with big box stores, fast food, you name it.”

Broad recognition of that reality, Smith says, made policymakers and other leaders more willing to invest in the early education workforce.

It also helps, she adds, that people understand what apprenticeships are. It’s a well-established model that they can visualize and — importantly — measure.

From day one, an apprentice is a W-2 employee. There is no such thing as an unpaid apprentice.

— Randi Wolfe

Randi Wolfe, founder and executive director of Early Care and Education Pathways to Success (ECEPTS), an organization that provides training and technical assistance to get programs registered as apprenticeships, believes this model is proliferating in early care and education because it’s a natural fit for the field’s workforce development needs.

The early care and education workforce, Wolfe points out, is mostly made up of low-income women, and they are disproportionately women of color, immigrants, non-native English speakers and first-generation college students.

“Asking those people to do an internship that is unpaid creates unintended inequity,” Wolfe says. “From day one, an apprentice is a W-2 employee. There is no such thing as an unpaid apprentice.”

It works well for both educators and early learning programs, she adds. Early childhood educators who can’t afford to miss out on wages while they earn a degree get to do both at the same time — and at little or no cost. They get raises throughout the apprenticeship and, in many cases, are eligible for a promotion once they complete it.

Their employers, meanwhile, end up with highly skilled teachers who, after investing significant time and energy into their careers, are more likely to remain in the field.

“They’re the best qualified candidate,” Wolfe says of apprentices. “You’ve trained them. You’ve grown them.”

For early learning programs, better-qualified teachers can also help them move up the scale on their state’s quality rating system. Higher quality ratings are tied to higher subsidy reimbursement rates in many states. In short, apprentices help a program’s bottom line.

All of these outcomes support children and families, who benefit greatly from having teachers who provide high-quality, research-backed care and education.

The Nuts and Bolts of Apprenticeships

To be considered a “registered” apprenticeship, programs must meet a number of criteria and get approval from the U.S. Department of Labor or a state apprenticeship agency. All registered apprenticeships have a sponsor, such as a community-based organization, a workforce intermediary or a business, that manages program operations. Registered apprenticeship programs have a few other key ingredients:

• Employers must partner with apprentices, allowing them to learn while they earn. In early care and education, the employers are early learning programs.
• Apprentices must receive on-the-job training with opportunities to practice their new skills in context. Many programs pair apprentices with a mentor to fulfill this goal.
• Apprentices must receive instruction related to their industry. In early care and education, that happens in a classroom setting, often at a community college but at four-year institutions too. Employers are expected to provide support and flexibility so apprentices can attend classes and complete coursework.
• Apprentices are guaranteed incremental wage increases as their knowledge and skills grow. This is a huge win for early educators, who have some of the lowest wages in the country, but also a point of tension for programs, which are seldom in a financial position to pay staff more.
• Apprentices must receive a credential. In early education, that is usually a CDA or an associate degree, and sometimes a bachelor’s degree.

Despite the many criteria, there is still some flexibility for individual apprenticeship programs to put their own spin on the model.

In Rhode Island, where Gundy apprenticed, the program is exclusively for infant and toddler teachers, often the “least educated and least compensated” faction of the early childhood workforce, says Lisa Hildebrand, executive director of the Rhode Island Association for the Education of Young Children, which helped develop and implement the program, in partnership with a state agency, and now manages it.

There is a notion in the field, Hildebrand says, that if you start out as an infant or toddler teacher, you can get more training and education and then “move up” to teaching preschool.

“It’s almost like a promotion,” she says, because preschool teachers typically earn more money and command more respect.

But that dynamic leads to the high turnover of infant and toddler teachers, which, given the challenges many programs already face with hiring and retention, and the legal requirements around staff-to-child ratios, can result in classroom closures and reduced slots for the youngest children. It certainly has in Rhode Island.

“The waiting list for infants and toddlers is absolutely astronomical,” Hildebrand says, acknowledging that’s true outside of Rhode Island too. “It is reaching critical levels at this point.”

With additional funding on the way, the apprenticeship may soon expand to preschool teachers, among whom there is ample interest, Hildebrand notes. But right now, Rhode Island is focused on retaining the teachers who are in the highest demand.

Minnesota’s registered apprenticeship program, which launched in summer 2023, includes a strong mentorship component. Each apprentice is paired with a mentor, often a colleague at the program where they work, says Erin Young, who manages the program for Child Care Aware of Minnesota.

“That’s the secret sauce,” says Young. “That’s the magic.”

Mentors, who receive 24 hours of free training, guide apprentices through questions and topics ranging from children’s behavioral challenges, to curriculum implementation, to family engagement. That can be especially helpful for apprentices who are still quite new to the field of early childhood education, Young explains.

“It’s nice to have someone say, ‘It’s OK.’ ‘Try this.’ ‘Start here,’” Young says. “Having a mentor at the beginning of my early childhood career would’ve been a huge help.”

The mentorship made an impression on Katelyn Sarkar, an apprentice who graduated with her bachelor’s degree in early childhood education leadership in June.

Katelyn Sarkar, a lead teacher and early childhood apprentice in Rochester, Minnesota, reads a book in her Head Start classroom. Photo courtesy of Sarkar.

Sarkar’s mentor would observe her in her classroom at a Head Start program in Rochester, Minnesota, then offer feedback and suggest strategies for her to try. “As an early childhood educator, I grew so much more in my skills because of that,” Sarkar shares.

Next up, Young is developing an apprenticeship model for licensed family child care providers, a group that is currently left out of most registered apprenticeship programs, despite being the “dominant form of care in rural Minnesota,” Young says, and an option preferred by many families.

“If it gets approved, that’s a really big win,” Young notes. “It opens the door for other states to do it.”

No Such Thing as a Silver Bullet

Although many early childhood advocates view the apprenticeship model as a promising strategy for workforce retention and improvement, they’re also quick to caution against overweighting its potential.

In early childhood, we tend to [want] a single solution to a complex problem. That does not work. ... Apprenticeships are never going to be the only answer.

— Linda Smith

“In early childhood, we tend to [want] a single solution to a complex problem. That does not work. The problems of child care in this country are very complicated,” says Smith of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute. “Apprenticeships are never going to be the only answer.”

The model, while exciting, has its limitations, Smith adds.

Right now, apprenticeship cohorts tend to be quite small, with around five to 25 early childhood educators enrolled. Rhode Island graduated 16 apprentices in its pilot cohort and has another 17 enrolled now. Minnesota had 19 apprentices enrolled as of June.

That’s because apprenticeship programs are demanding, resource-intensive and very costly.

In Minnesota, for example, where early childhood apprenticeship costs fall on the high end, Young budgets $20,000 to $24,000 per apprentice per year. Apprenticeships there run for at least two years, she says.

That estimate includes covering 85 percent of the cost of college tuition and books, as well as giving apprentices an annual $2,000 stipend to help with transportation, internet access and their remaining 10 percent of tuition costs, and awarding them a small bonus at the end of their apprenticeship year.

It also includes an annual $5,000 stipend to employers to offset the costs of hosting an apprentice. In Minnesota, employers chip in the final 5 percent of tuition costs, and they are expected to give apprentices a $1 an hour raise at the end of each year, which typically works out to be about $2,000 a year, Young says. It can be hard for employers to budget for that right away, she notes. Mentors also receive a $3,500 annual stipend.

It’s expensive, to be sure, but Minnesota recently received $5 million from the state earmarked specifically for apprenticeships, Young says.

“There’s not going to be one silver bullet,” Young acknowledges, “but professionalizing the field, reducing turnover and increasing compensation is going to have to happen, and I am hoping the data will show this is one positive strategy that moves the needle on that.”

Now 27 and finished with her apprenticeship, Gundy has received her CDA and been promoted to lead teacher in her toddler classroom. She’s also pursuing her bachelor’s degree in early childhood education.

“It was nice to get the science behind what I did,” Gundy shares about her apprenticeship experience. “It answered ‘why’ — why are we doing it this way, why is play important. … It helped me be an overall better teacher.”

© Photo courtesy of Katelyn Sarkar

As a school counselor, Leighanne Mainguy can never be sure what’s in store for her each day.

Some days, she arrives at her elementary school to learn that a student is in crisis and needs her full attention; she’ll clear her schedule. Occasionally, a tragedy in the community will leave students and staff shaken, and Mainguy will move swiftly to lend support.

The job can be heavy and hard. With so many young people today facing mental health challenges, such as anxiety, depression and stress, school counselors are in high demand. Yet their capacity is limited: School counselors in the U.S. have an average caseload of 385 students, based on the latest data available. (Mainguy’s caseload is slightly better than that, and the American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of one counselor to 250 students.)

But the job also comes with regular doses of levity, joy and laughter — moments that Mainguy describes as “soul building.”

Every week, a student may interact with dozens of adults in their school, from counselors to custodians, bus drivers to paraprofessionals, food service workers to school nurses. These individuals are integral to a school community but rarely as visible as, say, teachers and principals.

In a new series, “Role Call,” EdSurge is elevating the experiences of the myriad school staff members who help shape the day for kids. This month, we’re featuring school counselor Leighanne Mainguy, who shares how she came into this work, what people get wrong about it, and what she wishes she could change.

The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

---

Name: Leighanne Mainguy

Age: 49

Location: Las Vegas, Nevada

Role: School counselor

Current age group: PreK-5

Years in the field: 12

---

EdSurge: How did you get here? What brought you to this role?

Leighanne Mainguy: So I didn't start counseling until I was 38. I've always been a helper by nature. When I was a kid, I found a lot of joy in that. When I went to college, right out of high school, I got my degree in psychology and knew I wanted to do something in that realm, but circumstances didn't allow for that for quite some time.

For years, I was helping my husband through college, and we were having kids. We were living in Michigan, and I had a good job working in corporate America. Then we moved to Nevada, and with my husband’s support, I started a master’s program. In most states, you have to have your master’s degree to work as a school counselor.

I could have been a mental health professional as well — I could have gone into something like that. But I'll be honest with you, I love the school environment. I love working with kids. Plus, it's given me an opportunity to spend a lot of time with my husband and four children because they were in the school district (my husband is a teacher).

It's something that I think I was meant to do, but how I got here was just a long, long process.

When people outside of school ask you what you do — say, at a social event — how do you describe your work?

So in my profession, especially for people my age and older, the term used to be “guidance counselor.” We prefer to be called school counselors now, because previously a “counselor” would be considered somebody who supported you in finalizing your credits, who you might've only seen in high school and helped you maybe decide on which direction you were going to go after high school.

Now, many school counselors do tier one counseling, which is working with all students; tier two counseling, which might look like small group support; and then we might do tier three, which is individual counseling for short periods of time. I don't recall that ever being the case when I was a kid. I think I saw my guidance counselor once or twice, maybe, my senior year. Now we're in elementary schools, we're in middle schools, we're in high schools. So it's just a more well-rounded job.

Most of the time, I get a pretty good reaction to telling someone I’m a school counselor. They're like, ‘Cool, that's awesome. You're an educator.’ But if somebody allowed me to get that deep into it, that’s what I’d say.

What does a hard day look like in your role?

Hard days can be super emotional. I think most counselors are pretty good at compartmentalizing the bigger issues so we don't take it home at night, but we get to deal with some of the hardest things that a kid, or even a staff member, will see.

I've had kids come in the day after one of their parents died. I’ve had to talk to kids about some pretty horrific things that have happened in their homes. On top of that, days when we have to implement suicide protocols (after students have expressed thoughts of self-harm) are probably the most emotionally draining. We take that very seriously.

I mean, some days are kind of crazy just because you have a lot of busyness. I never know what my day is going to look like. I could come in one morning and have a plan to do three lessons and talk to five kids, and then find that a student is having some suicidal ideation first thing in the morning and have to support them through managing that, getting in touch with their family and managing the aftermath of that with their teachers.

Bigger events can be really difficult as well. We had a huge, traumatic event in our district with the Route 91 shooting in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017. That affected a lot of families in our community. Over 500 people were shot and 59 died.

Those are big days where you're like, ‘OK, scrap it.’ You shift gears, you’ve got to manage everything. You’ve got to take a step back [and ask yourself], ‘How are we going to support our students as a school? How are we going to support our staff?’

What does a really good day look like?

Field Day is always a really great day. We've had some professional athletes come — from the Golden Knights and the Raiders. They have these events where, like, 50 kids get to practice with the Raiders out in our field. We have picnics where parents come into our school, and we all go out in the field and eat with the students.

Anytime that it can feel like we’re a community, anytime we can do something big with the kids, and you just see them smiling and enjoying themselves, I would say those are my best days. There's nothing like seeing a kid light up, to see a kid giggle. It's soul building to see them have fun.

What is an unexpected way that your role shapes the day for kids?

School counselors are out and about all the time at our school. The day starts, and we're in the hallways with the kids. I think knowing that there are other people in the school besides their teacher that care enough to know their name, know about their families, ask about how their soccer game went last night, know that they have a big test coming up — I think, for some kids, that’s unexpected. For some parents, that’s unexpected. And I think that makes them feel important and seen and heard.

What do you wish you could change about your school or the education system today?

I wish that more people were willing to ask questions about what we do — like you are doing — and listen to our answers.

There are a lot of assumptions about the education field currently — not just about teachers, but about my role too.

I guess if I could change something, it would be that people would listen better, because I think so many of the people [making decisions about] public schools haven’t spent any time in them, and aren’t asking good questions about what we need to support our students.

Your role gives you unique access and insight into today's youth. What is one thing you've learned about young people through your work?

They just give me hope, as an adult. I think that we get super clouded in the day-to-day stuff — paying your bills and being an adult, it can be a lot. I'm not even going to get into politics and all the really scary things that can happen. But kids give me joy and hope.

I know that's not insight, necessarily, but they remind me of all the good things in life. Even though I get to hear some of the worst things that have happened to them, they remind me of all the good things in this world. So I guess maybe my insight is that us adults need to be a little more present in our day and learn to be a little bit more like kids.

© Bibidash / Shutterstock

While her daughter naps, Bridget Collins spends an hour reviewing and role-playing activities with her home visitor, Amanda Pedlar, in the front room of her house in San Antonio, Texas.

This week, the pair starts by discussing 3-year-old Brook’s burgeoning curiosity. Pedlar notes that it’s normal, at this stage of development, for Brook to ask “Why?” often, to want to try new things and to explore her environment. Then she gives Collins some suggestions for encouraging her daughter’s inquisitiveness.

Together, they work through an activity packet, covering topics such as language and motor skills. Collins will introduce these same activities to Brook in the coming days.

Bridget Collins, left, and home visitor Amanda Pedlar role-play washing their hands ahead of a "tasting party" where they will distinguish between sweet and crunchy foods. Photo by Emily Tate Sullivan.

When Pedlar and Collins role-play a “tasting party” — surrounded by stuffed toys and dolls, in the spirit of a tea party — and try to distinguish between foods that are sweet and those that are crunchy, Collins leans into the persona of her daughter, simulating the 3-year-old’s tendency to become distracted, to be silly and to interject with a defiant “no!”

It allows Pedlar the opportunity to model different reactions.

“It really helps to see her respond the way I should respond,” says Collins, who notes that she used to tell her kids “no” a lot but now sees a host of other ways to reply, such as with redirection.

Week after week, the activities help strengthen the bond between parent and child. Collins also says it’s boosted her confidence.

Kids are learning from their parents and caregivers from birth. But what they’re learning, and how they’re learning, varies widely. By connecting families with trained educators, home visiting programs give parents a chance to learn high-quality, developmentally appropriate activities to do with their kids and ask questions about their child’s needs and progress.

This year, EdSurge has been reporting on voluntary, evidence-based home visiting services and the difference they can make for children and families in the United States.

In one story, we examined how a home visiting program, Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY), is supporting immigrant families and connecting them to their communities. In another, we looked at how two long-running home visiting programs have adapted their models to serve home-based child care providers.

Over the past five months, we’ve observed home visits in two different states, attended a home visitor training and have spoken with more than 30 people to understand the home visiting landscape in this country and to see how these services support child development, improve school readiness, empower families and promote safe and healthy home learning environments.

Here are five key takeaways from our reporting:

1. Home visits do more than empower parents to be their child’s first and best teacher.

Home visits provide parents and caregivers with invaluable lessons and insights about their child’s learning and development. This can lead parents to become more confident teachers and more vocal advocates for their children. But the role of a home visitor extends beyond that.

“It's almost equally … about helping our families find the proper resources to improve their lives and improve maternal mental health,” notes Pedlar, the home visitor in San Antonio. “Things as simple as helping a family find a food resource and taking that burden off their shoulders can be really helpful.”

Home visitors provide goods such as diapers and wipes. They can connect families to resources such as food pantries, domestic violence prevention and early childhood intervention. And they’re often alerting parents to family-friendly events in the community, such as free days at the zoo.

Many home visiting programs also offer regular group meetings to convene participating families. For families new to this country, those meetings can provide a rare opportunity to meet others who come from their home country or speak their native language.

“At the end of the day, when you really deconstruct home visiting, it is about relationships,” notes Mimi Aledo-Sandoval, senior policy director at Alliance for Early Success, a nonprofit that works with early childhood advocates across all 50 states.

2. Home visiting programs can be beneficial for every family, but for now, their reach is limited.

More than 17 million families nationwide, including 23 million children, stand to benefit from voluntary, evidence-based home visiting services, according to the National Home Visiting Resource Center. That is to say, every pregnant woman and family with a child under age 6 has something to gain from these regular, in-home services.

“Being a parent is hard. Being a new parent is hard. I think that’s true regardless of socioeconomic strata, regardless of where you live. It is a life-changing event,” says Dr. Michael Warren, associate administrator of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau at the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “So it is helpful to be able to get resources and get assistance when you need help. Home visiting can help fill in those gaps.”

While home visits are proven to lead to positive outcomes for children and families, only some have access to these programs, due to lack of funding. In 2022, only about 270,000 families (about 1.6 percent of those eligible) received home visiting services.

With limited funding, many communities deploy home visiting programs for specific populations, such as low-income families, single-parent households, recent immigrants and refugee families, families experiencing homelessness and those with a history of substance abuse.

3. The U.S. government invests in home visiting programs, and funding is set to expand.

Many home visiting programs have been around for decades. Historically, they’d received state and local funds, as well as money from private foundations, says Sarah Crowne, senior research scientist at Child Trends, a nonprofit research center focused on children and families.

Then, in 2010, the federal government invested in home visiting programs for the first time with the creation of the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program. “It was a game changer for states,” Crowne says.

To access those federal funds, states must work with one of the 24 home visiting programs that have met HHS criteria for evidence of effectiveness.

There has not been an opportunity like this in the recent past to be able to do this kind of expansion for home visiting services.

— Michael Warren

“It’s very rigorous,” Crowne adds. “It’s not just that any program can get these funds.”

Before Congress reauthorized MIECHV in 2022, the program was funded at $400 million annually. Now, under a new funding formula, that allotment will double to $800 million annually by 2027. Starting this year, the federal government will match $3 for every $1 in non-federal funds spent on home visiting programs, up to a certain amount.

“It really opens that door wide for [states], and it allows them to expand into communities where they know there is need but they have not been able to serve those communities to date,” says Warren, whose department oversees MIECHV.

“It really is exciting,” he adds. “There has not been an opportunity like this in the recent past to be able to do this kind of expansion for home visiting services.”

4. Home visits are not a replacement for early childhood education, but they can help establish a solid foundation.

In a world where every family has access to high-quality early childhood education for their children, home visits would be a complementary support.

“In some countries, that is what happens,” says Miriam Westheimer, chief program officer for HIPPY International. “In this country, given very limited resources, that’s rare.” More often, in the U.S., children are either attending an early childhood program, or families are receiving home visits, she says. “It should not be one or the other,” Westheimer adds. “It often is.”

No one is arguing that home visits should be a child’s only outside learning experience before school, but with early care and education inaccessible and unaffordable for many families, that may be their only option.

In such cases, research has shown that home visits can give children a solid foundation from which to build as they begin school. Home visits help them acquire social-emotional skills, early literacy skills, and fine motor development, such as holding a pencil and using scissors.

5. The impact of home visits is expanding by serving home-based child care providers.

Home visits have traditionally been delivered to parents and primary caregivers. But in recent years, a number of home visiting programs, including HIPPY, ParentChild+ and Parents as Teachers, have seen an opportunity to expand their reach by serving home-based child care providers.

The model has proven successful, and many programs are trying to grow their presence among child care providers, including unlicensed “family, friend and neighbor” (FFN) providers, who are typically excluded from training and education programs.

A number of counties and states are finding ways to use public funds to implement this model.

Because many home-based child care providers serve multiple children and have strong relationships with the families they serve, many policymakers see them as well-positioned to translate the expertise they gain from home visits into positive outcomes for children.

© Photo by Emily Tate Sullivan for EdSurge

Soon after Miriam Bravo began watching her 2-year-old grandson full-time, she realized that many years had passed since she was last responsible for a young child. Feeling a bit rusty, she turned to the internet to seek out activities suitable for little Tadeo and advice for how best to support him.

She found some resources online, such as songs to sing with him, but Bravo wanted more.

Bravo is part of a group of caregivers often referred to as family, friend and neighbor (FFN) providers. Although this is the most common non-parental child care arrangement in the United States, used by millions of families, few options for training and education are available to FFN providers. Most early care and education supports are reserved for licensed child care providers or parents. And the limited professional development opportunities available to FFNs are often inaccessible, due to factors such as costs, scheduling and language barriers.

So it was lucky that when Bravo knocked on the door of a community center near her home in San Jose, California, wondering whether they had any programs to help her improve as a caregiver, she found exactly what she was looking for.

In Bravo’s northern California community, a home visiting service called ParentChild+ has adapted its well-established model for parents to fit the needs and priorities of home-based child care providers, including FFNs.

For decades, evidence-based home visits from trained professionals have supported families across the U.S. These programs empower parents to engage their children with high-quality, developmentally appropriate activities; promote social-emotional skills and school readiness among kids; and foster a safe, healthy, nurturing home environment. More recently, a number of national home visiting programs have recognized an opportunity to reach more children by serving home-based child care providers, too, and there’s evidence to show it’s making a difference.

“This is promising,” says Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a national initiative to increase access to and quality of home-based child care, “especially in a landscape where there are so few other interventions.”

People want to do right by kids and many times don’t have the tools or knowledge of what the right thing is. Sometimes it’s just bringing in new opportunities.

— Kerry Caverly

In the last few years, Home Grown has provided grants to three home visiting programs that serve home-based providers — ParentChild+, Parents as Teachers and Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters — to help them better understand the needs of the caregivers they’re engaging, learn what factors contribute to the success of the programs and, ultimately, expand their footprint.

It’s an investment in an often-overlooked but invaluable caregiver population that, in most cases, was already looking for ways to provide higher quality care and education to children, explains Kerry Caverly, chief program office at Parents as Teachers.

“People want to do right by kids and many times don’t have the tools or knowledge of what the right thing is,” Caverly says. “Sometimes it’s just bringing in new opportunities.”

An Organic Expansion

Bravo signed on to the free, voluntary, home-based child care model with ParentChild+ right away. Since February, Stephanie, the home visitor assigned to Bravo, has been visiting her and Tadeo twice a week.

Stephanie brings books, toys and materials that Bravo keeps and can use during future learning activities with Tadeo. But her home visitor’s biggest contributions, Bravo shares in Spanish through an interpreter, are less tangible.

Tadeo lights up when Stephanie arrives, Bravo says. He’s eager to find out which activity she planned for him that day. His motor skills have improved, and now, at 2-and-a-half years old, he’s cutting with scissors — a task that many children have not yet mastered by kindergarten. He is able to focus and complete activities that his attention span did not allow even a few months ago.

Bravo, for her part, has gained confidence. She has become a more patient, loving caregiver, she says. “It’s brought us closer.” She sees herself now as more than Tadeo’s grandmother; she is his teacher as well.

Miriam Bravo with her 2-year-old grandson Tadeo. Through home visits from ParentChild+, Bravo says she has become a better caregiver to Tadeo. Photo courtesy of Bravo.

The ParentChild+ home-based child care model emerged organically, says Sarah Walzer, CEO of the organization, which started in 1965 as a home visiting program for parents and today serves a majority immigrant population that speaks over 40 languages.

A little over a decade ago, home visitors reported that a number of parents in their caseload were caring for other children in the community. Over the next few years, in response to that need, ParentChild+ built out a parallel model tailored to home-based child care providers, including FFNs. Today, the program has a presence in 10 states.

The program for home-based providers runs for 24 weeks, compared to 46 weeks for families. The visits are designed around hands-on learning activities and play, Walzer says, adding that the goal is to improve the quality of the child care and to build school readiness for children, with attention to the learning environment and adult-child interactions.

We don’t go in there to find what is missing, lacking or illegal. We go in to look at what is going really well and strengthen [it].

— Sarah Walzer

Their work is strengths-based, Walzer explains. Home visitors seek to identify what’s already working and build on it — that’s true of other home visiting models and of home visits targeted to parents.

“We don’t go in there to find what is missing, lacking or illegal,” Walzer says. “We go in to look at what is going really well and strengthen areas of child care” based on evidence-based practices.

Parents as Teachers has a similar origin story for its home-based child care model, which they call “Supporting Care Providers Through Person Visits” (SCPV).

It was the late 1990s, and more women were entering the workforce, recalls Caverly, the chief program officer. More families, as a result, were seeking out child care arrangements. Home visitors serving families across the country were sharing that they’d show up for home visits and find a relative or neighbor with the child instead of the parent.

“It really got us thinking,” Caverly remembers.

Parents as Teachers adapted its curricula and built out the SCPV program, which is currently being used in 12 states. (With funding from Home Grown, they are updating their curricula for home-based providers and will spend much of 2025 using those new resources to expand their reach.)

Both Parents as Teachers and ParentChild+ serve a mix of licensed home-based child care providers and unlicensed FFNs through their home visiting programs, but “at the heart of it is FFNs,” says Caverly, adding that their work with FFNs does look, in a lot of ways, like their work with families.

One of the key distinctions between their work with providers and families, she says, is that providers learn how to do screenings and evaluations of the children in their care.

That element was especially valuable for Gretchen Dunn, a licensed provider in Olathe, Kansas.

Dunn has owned her home-based child care program for 25 years, she says, but when she heard Parents as Teachers was offering home visits for providers, she called up her local site and asked to participate.

She’s a seasoned provider who attends annual training, she acknowledges, but she liked the idea of getting a “refresher” and the chance to observe another early childhood professional interact with the kids in her care.

Gretchen Dunn with four children in her program on Valentine's Day 2024. Dunn learned how to screen for developmental delays during home visits from Parents as Teachers. Photo courtesy of Dunn.

Over the course of two years, Dunn received monthly home visits, during which her home visitor would usually lead an activity with the kids and leave Dunn with a handout so she could repeat it in the future. The home visitor also brought books. And she helped Dunn screen children for possible developmental delays using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, something Dunn hadn’t used before in her program. Those evaluations can tell a provider if a child may need to see a specialist — a speech therapist, for example — but they can also help inform providers about appropriate activities and interactions to use with each child.

The entire experience was validating for Dunn, she says. As the sole employee of her program, she has minimal adult interaction during the day. Plus, there is rarely anyone to observe her work or note if she is doing a good job.

“To have someone who actually knows my field and training come in and give me new ideas and support and back me up — all those things, that’s what I enjoyed” the most, she says.

‘Money Well Spent’

Perhaps the biggest hangup of this model is money, according to Renew of Home Grown.

The sites that already exist to provide home visiting services — to both families and providers — say that with more funding, they could reach many more caregivers.

“We know we have a lot of children who will fall through the cracks,” says Maria Rios, a home visitor for Parents as Teachers in Kansas City, Kansas, who has a caseload of 30 home-based child care providers. “I wish there was more funding.”

Rios, a former preschool teacher and school vice principal, is less concerned about children’s academic skills. “They’ll learn their ABCs in school,” she says. It’s the social-emotional skills — how to interact with other children, how to share — that she feels many children need to pick up sooner.

Home visiting programs are expensive to implement, as most high intensity, high integrity services tend to be, says Renew. It’s a big shift, she adds, for states and localities to go from spending zero dollars on FFN providers to investing thousands of dollars in each person. But she thinks it’s feasible, especially given the number of children who stand to benefit.

A few different funding models are in play already. The state of Colorado has used its Preschool Development Grant Birth to Five dollars on home visiting. And ParentChild+ is getting public funding, including dollars from the federal pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act, to support its home-based child care programming at several sites, including New York state and counties in North Carolina.

“From our perspective,” says Renew, “it’s money well spent.”

It certainly has been for Bravo, the FFN provider in California. Both the mentorship from her home visitor and the new community she has found among other FFNs in her area have made for a “beautiful experience.”

“It’s not just a program,” Bravo adds, “it’s a family.”

Equipped with new caregiving expertise, she’s thought about taking in more children. She is open to the idea, she says. At a minimum, she’ll get to use her knowledge with future grandchildren.

© MIA Studio / Shutterstock

Young people are struggling with mental health, and for many, the challenges have worsened over the last decade. About one in three high schoolers report persistent feelings of hopelessness and an alarming number say they’ve had thoughts of suicide.

Blame it on the pandemic, or climate change. Blame it on hyperpartisan politics, or the ubiquity of social media and smartphones. Regardless of the cause, today’s teenagers have made clear, in numerous surveys and anecdotes, that they need support.

But across the country, there are too few mental health specialists to serve the growing number of adolescents who could benefit from their services. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that more than a third of the country lives in an area where there is a shortage of mental health professionals, with at least 6,000 additional practitioners needed.

What we’re really trying to do is to get our youth more people in their corner who understand what they’re experiencing and want to invest in their success.

— AJ Pearlman

A cross section of leaders across government, philanthropy and the private sector believe that youth can be the solution to both challenges: They can simultaneously offer help and resources to their fellow Zoomers (as members of Gen Z are often called) while building skills that will draw them into — and will make them successful in — careers in behavioral health.

This fall, at least 500 recent high school and college graduates between the ages of 18 and 24 will make up the inaugural cohort of the Youth Mental Health Corps, a national initiative led by AmeriCorps, America Forward, Pinterest and the Schultz Family Foundation.

To start, it will launch in four states: Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Texas. A year later, in fall 2025, seven more states are expected to join the program: California, Iowa, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Utah and Virginia.

“It is really an innovative effort to try to address both parts of this crisis, by enabling initially hundreds and then thousands of young people to serve … in communities,” says Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a managing director at the Schultz Family Foundation.

Members of the Youth Mental Health Corps will serve for at least one year, with placements in middle and high schools as well as community-based organizations and health clinics. The program, which supports members in enrolling in or continuing college courses to work toward earning a degree, offers members career guidance on selecting a credential pathway to pursue and preparation and training for their placement.

Because members are just starting out in behavioral health, they will not be working as therapists or counselors, Chandrasekaran notes. Instead, they’ll primarily serve as “navigators,” helping connect peers and near-peers to services that already exist in their communities that they may not know about or know how to access.

“Folks often don’t know where to start,” explains AJ Pearlman, director of Public Health AmeriCorps. “That navigation and resource support is incredibly helpful, being in school or at a community clinic, meeting people where they are.”

Last year, AmeriCorps invested upward of $260 million in programming to support mental health nationwide, a spokesperson shared. In recent years, AmeriCorps applicants have increasingly shown interest in the mental health and behavioral health fields, at the same time that demand for mental health services has risen. The Youth Mental Health Corps is launching in response to those twin trends.

As a current AmeriCorps member serving with Colorado Youth for a Change, an organization that will become part of the Youth Mental Health Corps this fall, Nelly Grosso, 24, is getting a preview of what this work will look like. She connects high school students to mental health resources, food banks, pro bono immigration lawyers and public assistance programs such as SNAP and Medicaid.

Grosso, who identifies as a “first-generation American student,” says she primarily works with students who, like her, are the first in their family to navigate the American education system. Grosso has found that many students face language, income and resource barriers that are making it difficult for them to show up to school and engage in class. Those barriers are also taking a toll on students’ mental health. She introduces different coping mechanisms and calming strategies to students who are experiencing anxiety, depression, stress and anger, she says, but most of all, she’s trying to help remove the obstacles causing those feelings in the first place.

“It’s really hard to ask for help … because you don’t [always] know what you need,” she says. “It’s easy to feel isolated and alone.”

Grosso has created packets for her students that direct them to a host of free resources available to them. “I’m planting little seeds in everybody’s brain,” she says, so that when they are struggling, they’ll remember there’s a whole list of people and organizations that can help them.

Although Youth Mental Health Corps members will be acting more as liaisons to behavioral health services than delivering those supports themselves, their exposure to such services — and the people who provide them — is intended to help members learn about the field and further incentivize them to launch careers in it, Pearlman adds.

During their service year, they’ll receive a living stipend and an education award, along with training and credentials that will get them started on the path toward behavioral health.

“It will give them a leg up, a head start, in their journey to hopefully become a trained mental health professional,” Chandrasekaran says of the experience.

Nobody understands teenagers more than somebody who has recently been through high school.

— Nelly Grosso

Both Pearlman and Chandrasekaran refer to the youth mental health challenges today as a “national crisis,” echoing a sentiment that the U.S. Surgeon General has made clear in recent years.

They believe other young adults, of the same generation as the teens and tweens whose mental health is imperiled, are well positioned to help.

Corps members will know firsthand what it’s like to navigate high school in the era of social media, for example. They’ll know what it’s like to experience regular lockdown drills throughout the school year and to feel that the future of the planet rests on their shoulders.

“What we’re really trying to do is to get our youth more people in their corner who understand what they’re experiencing and want to invest in their success,” Pearlman says.

Grosso has found that to be true of her experience in AmeriCorps.

“Nobody understands teenagers more than somebody who has recently been through high school,” she says, noting that she uses TikTok and Instagram to relate to the students she works with at a public high school in the Denver metro area. “That’s a huge privilege that comes with being my age.”

But it goes deeper than that for Grosso. Raised by her monolingual Spanish-speaking grandparents, she felt that she was left to navigate the U.S. education system on her own. Surrounded by peers who spoke of things like SATs, PSATs and FAFSA forms, she felt lost.

She says that’s why this work resonates so much with her.

“My students are going through the same, or very similar, things that I did in high school,” Grosso explains. “I’m able to be the person to my students that I didn't have, which is really healing.”

© Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock

PUEBLO, Colorado — Standing in her living room, Isabel Valencia sets up her makeshift tennis serve with the materials on hand: a green balloon for a ball and a ruler affixed to a paper plate for a racket.

She bats the balloon to her home visitor, Mayra Ocampo, and they pass it back and forth, counting each return, offering encouragement and laughing at their mistakes.

The moment is light and playful, as it likely will be later in the week, when Valencia tries the same activity with her 4-year-old daughter Celeste. But Ocampo takes care to explain what’s happening beneath the surface: They’re not just playing tennis. They’re building social skills. They’re working on hand-eye coordination. And they’re practicing numeracy.

Home visitor Mayra Ocampo, left, and parent Isabel Valencia practice social and motor skills during a makeshift game of tennis. Photo by Eric Lars Bakke for AP.

Valencia, who came to the U.S. from Colombia a few years ago, found Ocampo through a free home visiting program that supports families with their children's early learning and development.

The model — and others like it — has provided a lifeline for families, especially those for whom access to quality early education is scarce or out of reach financially. These programs, which are set to expand with new federal support, are proven to help prepare children for school but have reached relatively few families.

It was during a trip to the grocery store in 2022 with her two young kids that somebody told Valencia about the home visiting program. She had moved to Pueblo, Colorado, only a few months earlier and was feeling isolated. She hadn’t met anyone else who spoke Spanish.

“I didn’t leave my house,” she says through an interpreter, “so I thought I was the only one.”

This story was published in collaboration with The Associated Press.

The Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters program, known as HIPPY, provides families with a trained support person — in Valencia’s case, Ocampo — who visits their home every week, showing them how to engage their children with fun, high-quality, developmentally appropriate activities.

The HIPPY program is unique for its two-generation approach. Through regular home visits and monthly group meetings, parents learn how to promote early literacy and social-emotional skills from staff who went through the program themselves and often share the same language and background as the families they serve.

The program is primarily implemented in low-income neighborhoods, as well as through school districts and organizations reaching immigrant and refugee families, says Miriam Westheimer, chief program officer for HIPPY International, which operates in 15 countries and 20 U.S. states.

Many other home visiting models exist, each with distinct features. Some employ registered nurses as home visitors, focusing on maternal and child health; others send social workers or early childhood specialists. They can begin as early as pregnancy or, as in the case of HIPPY, serve families with toddlers and preschool-aged children.

In the U.S., two dozen home visiting models have received a stamp of approval — and with it, access to funding — from the federal government’s Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program.

Dr. Michael Warren, associate administrator of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau at the Health Resources and Services Administration, which oversees the MIECHV program, has seen first-hand the way home visiting can strengthen families but says that, right now, its scope is too limited.

An estimated 17 million families nationwide stand to benefit from the type of voluntary, evidence-based home visiting services that Valencia receives. Yet in 2022, only about 270,000 did.

“That is purely because of resources,” notes Warren. “If more resources exist, more families can be served.”

Fortunately, he says, reinforcements are on the way.

The federal investment in the MIECHV program is set to double from $400 million to $800 million annually, by 2027. Beginning this year, the federal government will match $3 for every $1 in non-federal funds spent on home visiting programs, up to a certain amount. Since many states already have funding mechanisms in place — through a combination of public, nonprofit and private contributions — it is expected to be an easy win.

In interviews with more than 20 individuals who conduct, receive or research home visits, and in observation of two home visits in Colorado and Texas, the extent of this service’s impact on families and communities became clear.

Now in her second year of the HIPPY program, Valencia is a more confident parent. She says the structured curriculum she follows, paired with Ocampo’s support, have helped her prepare her daughter to thrive in preschool.

© Photo by Eric Lars Bakke for AP

Extreme weather events are on the rise around the globe, from historic floods to unseasonable heat waves and raging wildfires.

One doesn’t have to reach far to find fuel for climate-related fear and anxiety.

Heidi Rose, an elementary school teacher in Denver, Colorado, knows that all too well. She experienced years of what she describes as “pretty intense” climate anxiety, beginning around 2015, as she watched natural disasters unfold in the news and up close.

“I was having a hard time functioning and just continually thinking about how far past the point of no return we are,” she says, sitting on a too-small stool at a shared table in her first grade classroom at Lincoln Elementary School.

Her dismay seeped into her work, she acknowledges. Back then, she was talking with her students about climate and sustainability — as she has long done — but focusing too much on what’s broken, like how much trash is floating in the ocean.

These days, Rose has changed her approach — in part because she has developed a healthier outlook on climate change herself, but also because she sees that there are more effective ways to introduce young people to climate education and sustainability practices, especially early learners like her first graders.

I don’t want the first conversations they have about [the climate] to be super focused on problems or how bad things are.

— Heidi Rose

“One thing that I think is really important when you're talking with the younger kids, especially, about it, is try to do it in a way that's centered around appreciation and love, and less about fear and doom and gloom,” Rose says. “I don’t want the first conversations they have about [the climate] to be super focused on problems or how bad things are.”

Rose is among a growing number of classroom teachers who, either by their own volition or through directives from their states, are introducing students to climate change and the forces behind it. In most cases, teachers are avoiding talking about it in a way that incites fear or makes the issue feel abstract to children.

Instead, educators emphasize the importance of imbuing hope in these classroom conversations. They also share that they are grounding these lessons in local realities and a focus on sustainability in their own communities, while emphasizing the interconnectedness of people and places across the globe.

Moving Away From Abstraction

Climate change is generally too big a topic to tackle with younger kids — think preschoolers, kindergarteners, first graders — says Mark Windschitl, professor of science education at the University of Washington and author of Teaching Climate Change: Fostering Understanding, Resilience, and a Commitment to Justice.

“It’s too abstract,” he says. “It’s bleak.”

But teachers can still play a key role in helping young learners develop the skills to think critically about this issue in the future. And they can help build foundational knowledge.

Windschitl, a former science teacher, says that sustainability is a good starting point — especially if it’s taught in a concrete way kids can grasp.

Telling children to throw their banana peels into a compost bin because it helps the planet, he says, is not all that effective. But explaining to them the process that begins after the compost bin gets picked up — and relating that back to their role in it — can be.

In her first grade classroom, Rose has a waste-sorting station that she introduces to her students at the beginning of the school year. She explains what a landfill is, discusses what happens there, and shows them videos so they can see what a landfill looks like. She does the same with compostables and the three different types of recycling bins in her classroom. (Rose has a personal subscription to Ridwell, a service that allows her to dispose of students’ hard-to-recycle trash.)

Heidi Rose, a first grade teacher at Lincoln Elementary School in Denver, Colorado, at her classroom's waste-sorting station. Photo by Emily Tate Sullivan.

The goal of the waste-sorting station, she says, is to get the 6- and 7-year-olds in her class to think independently when they’re getting rid of something: Does this belong in the trash, a recycling bin or the compost bin — and why? It’s also to help them connect the dots on waste. “It’s not like we just put our plastic in a bin and it disappears,” Rose says. “It goes somewhere.”

“I try to plant the seed but not have it be tied to anything weighty or bring in any feelings of shame or guilt around it,” Rose adds, noting that many kids’ snacks come in plastic packaging, and that’s OK. “It’s more like a sense of intentionality and connecting what we’re using to where it’s come from. Just awareness and connectedness to the planet.”

Grounding Lessons in Local Examples

Another way teachers are making climate and sustainability more relevant to kids is by grounding lessons in local examples. The global scale of climate change is enormous. It’s easier for kids if they can first understand how it affects the people in their neighborhood, many educators note.

We always go back to why and how is this relevant to me, then how is it relevant to my community, then my city, then my planet.

— Manuela Zamora

“We know climate change is very complex, very overwhelming, very difficult to understand,” says Manuela Zamora, executive director of New York Sun Works, a nonprofit that has helped open hydroponic classrooms in more than 300 public schools across New York City and New Jersey, where it also promotes science education on climate change and sustainability.

“We always go back to why and how is this relevant to me, then how is it relevant to my community, then my city, then my planet,” she says of the group’s climate change curriculum.

Local and community-based examples help students dispel the notion that climate change is some remote concern that only impacts the polar bears, Zamora adds.

“Kids are very present in the day they’re in, in the place they’re in,” notes Elaine Makarevich, who taught in an elementary school for 30 years before recently becoming the New Jersey state lead for Subject to Climate, a hub that connects educators to standards-aligned resources for teaching climate change.

In rural areas, like the one where Makarevich taught, mass transit is inaccessible. And it doesn’t make sense, she says, to encourage kids to walk or bike when it may take their families 20 minutes by car to get to the nearest grocery store.

“It’s different in different places,” she adds. “If you’re in a community with flooded homes, it’s a different concern. It’s very place-based.”

Once kids understand their local challenges, educators say, they can begin to connect the needs of their own community to the needs and experiences of communities around the globe.

Leading With Hope

Even when she taught children as early as kindergarten, Makarevich would try to instill in her students a love for the planet, an appreciation for how interconnected its inhabitants are, and care and concern for its future.

As students get older, those conversations get “deeper and richer,” she says. They can learn not only to respect the planet but to understand “how it works, what it gives us and what we give it.”

In every lesson, even those on the changing climate, “there was always that hopeful solutions base,” Makarevich shares. “That’s really important.”

Five-year-olds can help recycle in their classroom and cafeteria. They can plant flowers, she says. Ten-year-olds can take part in community cleanups or join the school’s “green team,” if it has one.

In Rose’s Denver classroom, she has two full bins of children’s books about conservation and the planet. Those help her to talk about the Earth in an “optimistic and honest” way, she says.

Heidi Rose has two full bins of books about conservation and the planet in her first grade classroom. Photo by Emily Tate Sullivan.

It’s still far from perfect. Every day, she admits, her elementary school uses 260 plastic utensils.

“We are kind of limited in the large changes we can make as a school, maybe even as a district,” Rose says. “I focus more on what is within my control as a classroom teacher instead of getting lost in what is outside my control.”

It’s not dissimilar, she says, to what she’s trying to communicate to her students. They may not be able to control the bigger drivers of climate change, even when they’re older, but they can develop an awareness of and a connection to the planet. And that’s a start.

© Tatiana Gordievskaia / Shutterstock

With interest in the teaching profession waning and enrollment in teacher preparation programs reaching historic lows, all eyes are on the next crop of students — tomorrow’s prospective educators — to make up the deficit.

Today’s high school and college students are part of Generation Z, a group of people who range in age from 12 to 28, and have characteristics, attitudes and aspirations that distinguish them from prior generations.

In partnership with researchers at Vanderbilt University, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), a nonprofit that works to improve public education across 16 states in the Southeast, has been examining the next generation’s interest in the teaching profession and has published their findings in a report released in April.

Using extensive student survey data from ACT, a nonprofit assessment organization, along with state-level educator data and interviews with Gen Z teacher candidates and newly hired teachers, the researchers gained insight into Gen Z’s perceptions and motivations around teaching and identified opportunities to attract more of them into the field.

Though the study concentrates on two “data-rich” states, Kentucky and Tennessee, researchers say their findings are consistent with what one might expect to see nationally.

“A lot of trends in Kentucky and Tennessee mirror the trends in the South and across the nation,” says Megan Boren, project manager at SREB and a co-author of the report — with the caveat that teacher shortages are generally more severe in the South than in other parts of the U.S.

Gen Z is more college-going and tech-savvy than its predecessors. It is more racially and ethnically diverse. And according to a literature review conducted by the researchers, Americans who are part of Gen Z say they want jobs that provide financial security and ongoing support, along with flexibility, autonomy, collaboration and a sense of purpose.

Some of those characteristics are consistent with careers in education. Teaching, many would argue, is one of the most meaningful jobs available. It is not, however, known for its flexibility or pay.

As a result, members of Gen Z are less interested in becoming teachers than earlier generations. Enrollment in preparation programs began to dip around 2010, but it hit new lows once the first members of Gen Z (colloquially referred to as Zoomers) entered higher education in 2014, researchers found.

The decline has become worse in the decade since, says Thomas Smith, professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt and an author of the report.

Drawing on ACT data from the eight Southern states that require or pay for high schoolers to take the test, Smith and his colleagues found that, between 2013 and 2022, interest steadily dwindled. Because it was already minimal to begin with, the researchers say, this is a worrying trend.

“In our country, the best avenue that students have to excel, to achieve and to be part of this workforce is through education,” says Stephen Pruitt, president of SREB. “So if we don’t have the people who are able to teach our students, it’s going to be a severe cap on what people are able to do.”

There are ways to turn that trend around, Boren and Smith believe.

In the study, they found that participation in introductory high school teaching courses in Kentucky and Tennessee was increasing. It’s possible, they say, that the emergence of those classes has prevented even steeper declines among those entering the field, and that cultivating an early interest in education is key to building a strong pipeline. (It’s also possible, Smith adds, that such courses are popular because they are seen as “easier.”)

Data from the annual Tennessee Educator Survey found that more than half of early-career teachers entered college “already sure or pretty sure” that they wanted to go into education.

“That leads us to keep thinking about what can be done early on to get people hooked on teaching as a profession,” says Smith.

Gen Z is looking for flexibility. Teaching has not traditionally been a flexible job.

— Thomas Smith

Boren agrees that early exposure could be a critical route for getting more people into educator preparation programs and, ultimately, classrooms.

“Teaching is less attractive than maybe it once was,” she acknowledges. “Parents are not encouraging their children to go into teaching. Sometimes teachers aren’t encouraging students to go into teaching. If we were able to turn that narrative around and introduce the wonderfulness of teaching to students early on, give them a taste of it — perhaps that can be one of the many ways we can get more folks into the classroom.”

Still, that tactic doesn’t solve the many downsides to teaching that Gen Z sees: rigid scheduling, isolation in classrooms, low compensation, lack of autonomy, and a lack of respect, appreciation and professionalization from the public.

“Gen Z is looking for flexibility,” Smith says. “Teaching has not traditionally been a flexible job.”

It’s a difficult reality, especially when many other jobs have only become more flexible since the pandemic; hybrid and remote working arrangements have stuck around in other sectors.

It’s not just about remote work, though, Boren says. “The way things have always been done is not attractive to Gen Z.” They want work-life balance. They want to incorporate “innovative technology use,” she says.

Boren says there are “hundreds” of examples of schools creatively building flexibility into the workday and work week for teachers.

One strategy is hiring additional support staff, allowing teachers to have guaranteed planning time or freeing them up to walk down the hall and observe a colleague teach a lesson. That lends itself to both flexibility and support, she notes. Boren shared about a district that opens one hour late on Wednesdays so staff can run errands or otherwise get that time back for themselves. She also mentioned a school in Oklahoma that worked with the community to set a schedule that allows teachers to have every Friday off work in April and May, when the weather is nice and morale may be slipping toward the end of the school year.

“A little bit of give and take is really what folks are asking for,” she says.

Those examples, so far, are sparing. Pruitt, the SREB president and a former teacher, concedes that in most places, trying to make any changes to the structure of the school day or week is going to be met with resistance.

“We’re in the same model we’ve been using since the 1800s,” he says, underscoring the challenge.

Members of Gen Z also want to be a part of work that is collaborative, which exists in pockets of the profession but is “not a strong tradition in teaching,” Smith says. “There’s much more of a tradition of being on your own in your class with your door closed.”

The relationship with students — along with the impact on young people and, by extension, society — is attractive to members of Gen Z, Boren and Smith say. It also aligns with what EdSurge has found in interviews with early-career teachers and teacher candidates who are part of Gen Z.

Yet a sense of purpose alone clearly isn’t sufficient to compel enough young people into the field.

Some members of Gen Z may have seen firsthand, as students, that their teachers were not given the support, tools or appreciation they needed to be successful, Smith notes. Others may have internalized negative narratives and perceptions of teaching that others share.

“Those messages are being picked up by lots of folks, and certainly Gen Z included,” says Smith. “It’s not doing us any favors to get more teachers.”

© insta_photos / Shutterstock

Viridiana Martinez’s family immigrated twice when she was in elementary school — once, from Mexico to Canada, and a second time to the United States. With each move, she had to learn a new language and adjust to a different culture.

During those transitions, Martinez was both challenged and uplifted, often by kind teachers and mentors whom she met at school.

Now a college graduate, the 21-year-old is channeling her lived experiences into a career path.

This fall, Martinez will become a bilingual teacher for students in kindergarten through eighth grade in Morgan Hill, a small city near San Jose, California, as part of the next Teach for America cohort. Her teacher training begins in June.

Martinez knows that there is a dearth of bilingual teachers in the United States, and she wants to help fill the gap. But more than that, she wants to encourage bilingual students and English language learners the way other teachers did for her. Along the way, she says, she wants to help students identify their strengths and find their voices.

At a time when the teaching profession is in decline, with fewer young people entering the field, EdSurge is following individuals pursuing careers in the classroom anyway. What motivates them? What worries them? And why are they undeterred?

In our Future Teachers series, we ask these questions to aspiring educators on the cusp of entering the classroom. In this installment, we’re featuring Martinez.

The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

---

Name: Viridiana Martinez

Age: 21

Current town: Berkeley, California

College: University of California, Berkeley

Intends to teach: Bilingual education in a K-8 school

Hometown: Monterrey, Mexico

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EdSurge: What is your earliest memory of a teacher?

Viridiana Martinez: The earliest memory I have of a teacher is my first grade teacher in Mexico. She was stern, but also very loving. She always had very high expectations of her students, and that is something that I really appreciated about her. She believed her students could achieve great things.

Viridiana Martinez with her first grade teacher in Monterrey, Mexico. (Photo courtesy of Martinez)

When did you realize that you might want to become a teacher?

I worked in an elementary school as part of my education minor at the University of California, Berkeley, during my junior year, and I think that had a great impact on me. I would have one-on-one sessions with students so they could practice and enhance their reading skills and fluency. I really enjoyed working with my students, and seeing them improve made me feel super proud of them. I’ve wanted to go into the teaching profession ever since then.

That would’ve been in college for you. What had you been thinking you might want to do before that?

Before, I wanted to study psychology … but I didn't know exactly what path I wanted to take. Then, as I added my education and child development minors, [my classes] sparked my interest in going into teaching. I didn't have a specific plan or career picked out previously. I was just kind of going with the flow, really.

I knew that I wanted to work with children. I just didn't know what profession yet. Teaching did cross my mind. Then, as I went through this experience and started working with students, it solidified for me that I definitely wanted to become a teacher.

Did you ever reconsider?

I don't think so. I went through a lot of ideas of what careers I could go into, but nothing really felt as fulfilling as teaching, so I stuck with it.

Did your own experiences in school have any influence on your decision to pursue this career?

Yeah. I attended schools in California that have predominantly Latino populations, and I did have a few Latino teachers that were able to help me learn English. I think that sense of community and support from my own teachers and counselors helped me decide that this was something that I wanted to do.

I understand that you had to learn a couple different languages as part of your schooling. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

I was born in Mexico and lived there until I was 7 years old. Then I moved to a French-speaking region in Canada with my family, so I had to learn French in addition to everything else that comes from moving countries. There was a shift in culture and in school.

Then, about three years later, my family and I moved again, to California, so I had to learn English and readjust all over again. I have been in California ever since.

Viridiana Martinez sees snow for the first time after moving with her family from Mexico to Canada. (Photo courtesy of Martinez)

Were there any teachers, coaches or counselors who helped you through those transitions that stand out to you?

Absolutely. I came to California when I was in fifth grade, and I had two teachers that were amazing. They always made me feel included in the classroom. They made sure that I had access to learning the language — for example, they labeled the items in the classroom for me in Spanish and English. And they explained my situation to the other students in the class so that they could understand the position I was in.

Were there other English language learners in your classes?

Not in fifth grade, but years later, when I was in middle school and high school, I did meet students who were just learning English as their second language.

Tell me about your decision to apply for Teach for America.

I heard about Teach for America during my last semester at UC Berkeley, and I thought it was a perfect step for me. I attended one of their in-person events and met multiple people who were part of the program and were able to answer my questions. I ended up applying shortly after attending the event. I chose this program because they offered great communication and support, which is exactly what I was looking for.

My goal is to become a full-time classroom teacher.

Why are you interested in teaching bilingual K-8 classes?

I am very passionate about teaching in bilingual classrooms. I [want to help students] overcome language barriers and cultural barriers. My experience moving countries twice and having to learn a new language twice has given me a lot of insight into what students go through and what I can do to help them to succeed in the classroom.

Why do you want to become a teacher?

I think that it is a very fulfilling profession. Everyone wants the next generations to excel in academics and be able to have a bright future. I want to make sure that the next generation has the right support [to succeed].

In college, during my experience [tutoring] at the elementary school, I had a student who inspired me. It wasn't until the end of our session, but we had a little survey for them with questions about how their sessions went, whether they felt like they learned anything, that sort of thing. One of the questions was what they wanted to do when they grow up, and this particular student said that they wanted to be a tutor just like me. That just really solidified it for me.

What gives you hope about becoming a teacher?

Just having an impact on the next generation is what gives me hope. I’m excited to show them what their strengths are, help them see that they can speak on their own and that they can make a difference if they believe in themselves.

What worries you or gives you pause about becoming a teacher?

I have heard that many teachers have noticed a big setback in students' math and reading skills since the pandemic. It was a very difficult time for both teachers and students, which unfortunately resulted in slower learning. My biggest worry is how this will actually play out in the classroom and what I can do to effectively support my students.

Why does the field need you right now?

We need more bilingual teachers. That is really important. There are so many schools that have students that are either currently trying to learn English as their second language or are bilingual. They deserve to have access to bilingual programs with bilingual teachers that can support them to excel academically. And I think that my own experiences will allow me to provide enriching bilingual classes to students.

© URem / Shutterstock

A program that began in Kentucky as a novel idea to rebuild the early childhood workforce — and, in effect, buoy the broader labor market — has quickly spread to states across the country.

To draw early educators back into classrooms, legislators in the Bluegrass State made a change in fall 2022 that expanded the eligibility requirements of Kentucky’s child care subsidy program to include all staff who work at least 20 hours per week in a licensed early care and education program. In effect, early childhood educators became automatically eligible for free child care for their own kids, regardless of household income.

It was an instant boon. In its first year, 3,200 Kentucky parents working in early care and education participated in the program, with some 5,600 children benefitting.

Early childhood advocates, policymakers and business leaders in other states took notice. A creative solution with immediate impacts? They wanted in.

“It blew up,” says Lauren Hogan, managing director of policy and professional advancement at the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a nonprofit membership organization that advocates for high-quality early learning. “There’s a reason it’s gotten steam. It’s proven valuable.”

A year-and-a-half into Kentucky’s experiment, more than a dozen states have either launched their own programs or are seriously considering it, including Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, Nebraska and Rhode Island.

If all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., adopted a policy like Kentucky’s, more than 234,000 staff in early care and education settings with children under age 6 could benefit, according to an estimate from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment.

The premise of the initiative is simple: Better-staffed early care and education programs will increase the supply of child care, allowing more parents to re-enter the workforce. But the field has struggled to retain and attract staff.

Over the last few years, amid the pandemic and rising inflation, many early educators left the field because they found they could make more money elsewhere. Everyone from Amazon to Target to Chick-fil-A was offering higher wages. Child care providers, already operating on the tiniest of margins and charging families more than they can reasonably afford, simply couldn’t compete.

The result was understaffed early care and education programs, leading to closed classrooms and more families without access to care.

Kentucky’s approach works because it gives early care and education providers a tool to retain the staff they have and sweeten the deal for prospective educators.

“If you can’t directly increase the money in folks’ pockets, you can at least reduce their costs,” explains Hogan. “A lot of them have child care costs.”

Some of our educators can’t even pay for their own children to go to the program where they work, and that just doesn’t make sense.

— Lisa Hildebrand

Beyond how attractive it is for the economy, the program is also snuffing out a bitter irony that has long persisted in the field: Those who provide child care can seldom afford it themselves.

“Some of our educators can’t even pay for their own children to go to the program where they work, and that just doesn’t make sense,” says Lisa Hildebrand, executive director of the Rhode Island Association for the Education of Young Children. “Now, there is a way for them to be able to afford that.”

Rhode Island is eight months into a year-long, $4 million pilot of a program modeled on Kentucky’s — one that Hildebrand hopes will be renewed in the state legislature come June.

There is certainly evidence to support its continuation, she shares.

As of March, 475 children were participating in the pilot program. Their parents work across 162 different center- and home-based early education programs throughout Rhode Island.

Of those participating, 23 percent were already eligible for the state’s existing income-based Child Care Assistance Program. But more than three-fourths have had child care expenses waived through the pilot. (Rhode Island’s program differs from Kentucky’s in that it does have an income cap, just one that is notably higher than that available to other families in the state.)

Providers have shared that they’ve been able to bring back former classroom teachers and attract new ones to their programs, which is a huge relief to the sector, Hildebrand says.

“Staffing right now is at such a critical level [for some providers] that if they lose one teacher it means closing a classroom with a large number of children,” she explains. “We [already] have long wait lists, families waiting years for a slot. That’s less people in the workforce.”

In a survey conducted by the Rhode Island Department of Human Services, which administers the program, one provider called the pilot “life changing” for staff with young children. Others mentioned an influx of job applicants and new hires who are experienced and excited to work in the field — neither of which is a given in the underpaid profession.

Another provider said, “This has been an amazing experience. We were able to attract a top-notch toddler teacher who had chosen to stay home because the cost of child care was too high in comparison to her income.”

“Categorical eligibility” for child care workers is a rare policy solution that “can be embraced by red states and blue states,” notes Hogan.

We cannot solve our workforce crisis without solving our child care crisis.

— Katie Bass

In Nebraska, a bipartisan group of legislators has been pushing for a bill with expanded eligibility for early care and education staff this legislative session.

“We are in a workforce crisis in Nebraska, and we’re in a child care crisis,” says Katie Bass, data and policy research advisor at First Five Nebraska, a bipartisan public policy organization focused on expanding opportunities in the early years. “We cannot solve our workforce crisis without solving our child care crisis.”

The Nebraska bill ultimately did not pass before the end of the session in mid-April — there just wasn’t enough money this time, Bass explains, but says “it’s certainly not stopping here.”

Representatives from conservative and liberal groups alike testified in favor of the program. The bill’s sponsor, State Sen. John Fredrickson, intends to reintroduce the legislation in the next session, which begins in January 2025, Bass says. In the meantime, he has introduced an interim study to evaluate the different approaches other states are taking and determine the version that will best suit early educators in Nebraska.

“It’s kind of unprecedented,” Bass says of the bill’s wide base of supporters. “The lack of child care is affecting every single sector’s ability to operate.”

© Lordn / Shutterstock

Around this time four years ago, a seismic event was rippling across education.

In April 2020, teachers were beginning to realize that their schools’ closures would not be all that temporary. They’d need to make do with haphazard plans for distance learning through the end of the school year — perhaps longer.

For most educators, the pandemic was a defining moment in their careers, a situation more disruptive than they could’ve imagined.

For first-year teachers, it was baptism by fire.

In summer 2020, EdSurge profiled nine first-year teachers to understand what it was like for them to launch their careers during the pandemic year (2019-20).

Now, all of them are (or would be) in their fifth year in the classroom — a year by which about 44 percent of educators have left the profession. We checked in with them this month to see how they’re doing, what they’re up to and where they are now.

Six of the original nine responded to our queries. Of those six, one left teaching during her third year, and another will resign next month, at the end of the school year. The other four are still teaching and plan to continue.

EdSurge asked them to share about the challenges, rewards and lessons from their first five years — and, if they left, to elaborate on what drove them out. Their written responses are below, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

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Read the original story, from August 2020, here. Or listen to some of the teachers reflect on their first year during an episode of the EdSurge Podcast.

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Lauren Bayersdorfer

Age: 28
Location: East Rutherford, New Jersey
Status: Still teaching
Starting salary: ~$65,000
Current salary: ~$70,000

Can you give a brief overview of what you’ve taught over the past five years?

I spent the first 3.5 years of my career at Weehawken High School, where I taught Algebra I (students in grades seven to nine) and AP Calculus (grades 11-12). For the past 1.5 years, I have been teaching Algebra I and geometry for grades nine and 10 at Becton Regional High School.

What has been the most challenging and rewarding part of your job?

The most challenging part has definitely been trying to keep students engaged in the classroom and interested in their learning. It's hard to teach math, period. But to compete with TikTok, social media and talking to their friends makes it that much more difficult.

The most rewarding part has been to get to know the kids on a more personal level, whether by incorporating occasional community-building activities in the classroom, or through the privilege of being their coach outside of the classroom. In addition, being able to learn from — and form friendships with — colleagues has been rewarding.

What has been the most surprising part of your teaching experience so far?

Just simply how difficult and demanding the job is. I normally walk more than 10,000 steps during school hours and am always exhausted by the end of the school day. Sometimes I just need a few minutes in my car to decompress before I run errands, go home and do more work. You always try to tell yourself, “It's only a job,” and not work outside of contract hours, but teaching is so much more than a job. It's a passion.

How do you think starting your career during the height of COVID-19 shaped your teaching experience and approach?

It showed me how, before any of the items in the job description and responsibilities [related to] teaching them math, that my No. 1 goal is to build relationships with students. You never know what any student is tackling. Coming to your class or seeing you in the hallway might be the highlight of their day!

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Jamie Wong Baesa

Age: 28
Location: Lorena, Texas
Status: Still teaching, but leaving at the end of this school year
Starting salary: ~$40,000
Current salary: ~$48,000

Can you give a brief overview of what you’ve taught over the past five years?

I have been in the same school (and same classroom!) since I first started. However, my roles and responsibilities have shifted. I started out teaching seventh grade math and did that for three years. Being in a small school, they needed help taking on extra elective sections, so I also started teaching eighth grade art in my fourth year. Finally, this year, I’ve added sixth grade math, so now I have a hand in all three grade levels at our middle school.

What has been the most challenging and rewarding part of your job?

The most challenging part of my job has been “all the other stuff” that comes with teaching. I teach math and art, but I also teach kids how to disagree in a healthy way, how to handle stress, how to communicate effectively, how to read and write, how to engage in the world we live in and how to manage social media. No one tells you that when you become a teacher, your role encompasses so much. We are with these students for eight hours every day, and the influence and opportunity we have is incredible, but also really hard, especially coming out of the pandemic. We aren’t trained to be professional counselors, but a lot of times this role (and many others) are thrust upon us because we are available and we care. I think this is also what leads to teacher burnout. We do so much more than our job descriptions and do not necessarily get the compensation or training we need to do it all.

The most rewarding part of my job has always been relationships — with students and with coworkers. Teaching is 100 percent a people profession, and it has been a joy to interact daily with so many wonderful humans, to see each individual grow and change and go through different life stages — good and bad. To have a tight-knit community like this has been very impactful for me.

How do you think starting your career during the height of COVID-19 shaped your teaching experience and approach?

In my five years, I had a hard time figuring out what “normal” was supposed to be in teaching. From a year cut short by COVID-19, to a hybrid year, to a year where we pretended nothing had happened — every year was a rollercoaster and vastly different from the previous one.

On the bright side, my teaching approach became one of adaptability and resilience. I had to constantly ask myself: What really matters? Is it that the student can tell me what lateral surface area is, or is it that a student who has a family member with autoimmune disease feels safe at school every day? It was not always such a dramatic dichotomy, but I think many can relate to this idea of survival. We taught what we could, we emphasized the content and skills that would last, but we also just made sure everyone was safe, healthy and getting what they individually needed. This shifted my perspective and helped me remember that, just as we try to individualize instruction, we also remember that every student (and teacher) is going through something different and needs both grace and accountability.

I think teaching these past five years has made me more empathetic and reminded me that isolated classrooms [existing] in a school bubble aren’t realistic. The students I see daily are responding to society and the events in our world and will one day have a huge impact as its future citizens. I hope in a similar manner, my impact extends beyond [sharpening] mathematical understanding to [supporting students in] how to be productive, kind, discerning humans in our world.

Wong Baesa is resigning at the end of the school year to pursue a career outside of K-12 education. While she says she still fully believes in the importance of educating the future generation, she hopes to be able to do so outside of a classroom setting.

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Kristen Bao (Stein)

Age: 29
Location: Oklahoma
Status: Left teaching in year three

Sadly, I left the classroom after the first quarter of the 2021-22 school year after teaching for just over two years. There were many factors that contributed to that decision.

On the practical side, I spent a great deal of effort on personal financial discipline during the first two years of my career and found success in attaining the short-term financial goal I had set for myself (saving up a six-month emergency fund). I also bought my first car, with $2,500 cash. So in year three of teaching, when I started thinking about my long-term goals and ran some financial planning calculations based on Oklahoma's pay-rate at the time, I found that even if I saved 33 percent of my income, between student loans and saving for retirement (because the compensation from the Teachers’ Retirement System of Oklahoma is not actually enough to live on during retirement), it would take me nearly a decade to be able to save for a down payment on a home. Even though I told myself every day to remember, “You're not in this for the money, you never were,” this realization was incredibly disheartening, and I don't think I was ever really able to get over that throughout the first nine weeks of the year I resigned.

At the same time, I also continued to deal with imposter syndrome. As a new teacher, I constantly felt inadequate, unable to accomplish the feats my veteran coworkers seemed to be completing with ease. I was always wondering when everyone — my principal, my students, their parents, my fellow teachers — would realize that I didn't belong there. These feelings were complicated by the fact that I was actually able to build amazing relationships with everyone in that list. Parents were lavishing me with gifts, words of gratitude and encouragement throughout the year. Students would write me notes telling me how much they loved having me as their teacher. Right before I resigned, my principal had even given me the most positive evaluation I had received since I started. She practically raved about how much I had improved in every area and how much potential she knew I still had to excel even further with time and patience.

But none of that was enough. I knew I couldn't sustain the level of success and productivity that she was depending on, or that my students needed. I had increasingly severe anxiety attacks throughout the first nine weeks of my third year of teaching. Some small thing would fall through the cracks, and I would experience symptoms such as shortness of breath for hours on end, a lump in my throat, being on the verge of tears, headaches and blurred vision. On the day that one of these attacks lasted the entire eight-hour school day, I finally opened up to my dearly beloved mentor teacher down the hall about all of these things. As I drove home after sharing with her, I knew it was time for me to step away.

I experimented with a few other career paths before I became a district executive for the Boy Scouts of America in September 2022. When this job found me, I knew it was an incredible opportunity to participate in an organization that precisely aligned with my passion. I know that I was created to contribute to helping children and families in my community flourish. This is exactly what I get to pour myself into when I wake up each morning in this current role.

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Hannah Coffey (Long)

Age: 30
Location: Petaluma, California
Status: Still teaching
Starting salary: ~$46,000
Current salary: ~$83,000

Can you give a brief overview of what you’ve taught over the past five years?

I have taught the same grade, transitional kindergarten (TK), since I started teaching, but I have moved schools twice. In the 2021-22 school year, I moved to an elementary school in Santa Rosa, California. It was a significant raise in pay, but a 30-minute commute. That school has a lot of strengths and I learned a lot, but it had its flaws and complications as well. Long story short, I left. I almost stopped teaching.

Then, I got my dream job at Sonoma Mountain Charter. It is a wonderful school with a wonderful staff. It is close to my house, and I have the privilege of working with my mom, who is one of the school counselors in the district. It is an arts charter school, and there are a lot of ways teachers and students participate in the arts. Students learn to play instruments, participate in plays and engage in an amazing art adventure week, in which students are placed in mixed-age cohorts, and work on art projects together. As an artist myself, it is so nice to get to use my art degree so much in my professional life.

What has been the most challenging and rewarding part of your job?

One of the challenges I faced was with varying opinions over COVID protocols. My mom has cancer and my husband has asthma, so COVID could have been very serious for either of them; as a result my husband and I were incredibly careful. That part is still hard. I wear a mask to this day. At one point, I decided I was not going to wear a mask, and seven days later, I got COVID for the first time. So I went back to masking.

The most rewarding part of teaching is the ability to help shape the future. It is a big responsibility that I take very seriously. I try to teach using multicultural materials. I teach about gender inequality and how to be kind, empathetic and accepting. Setting the foundation for most more advanced skills is amazing. A huge part of teaching littles is helping them develop a love of learning. I have to tell my students that we can’t read words on the board anymore because it is time for recess, and they beg me to continue reading. They LOVE asking questions and discovering new things. It is really amazing and truly fun!

What has been the most surprising part of your teaching experience so far?

When we returned to school in March 2021 … I had a third of my class in person in the morning, another third of my class online at the same time, then the last third in person in the afternoon. [I was surprised by] how different the kids were from how they were at home [on Zoom], as well as some of the parenting choices that we were experiencing. It was hard to get a hold of parents, and we had to tell parents to put pants on and not swear while their kids were Zooming.

How do you think starting your career during the height of COVID-19 shaped your teaching experience and approach?

I think that starting my career at the height of COVID shaped my teaching experience in a lot of different ways. We were asked to do so much. I had 28 students, and I taught a class that combined TK and kindergarten students. I was in graduate school. I was planning my wedding (which was ultimately postponed). My mom was in treatment. My [now] husband wasn’t working. It was an extremely stressful time, and then we went on an extended spring break and never came back that year. I remember driving around to my students’ houses at the end of the year just to say goodbye from a distance.

Teaching has gotten so much easier, which is normal, especially if you stay in the same grade. But it’s also because [other parts of my life have slowed down]. I graduated with my master’s degree, so that stress was gone. And I moved schools, so I was making more money, so that stress was gone. Then we had the wedding, so that stress was gone. The vaccines came out, so at least we were a little protected. Now I don’t have a long commute, I teach in a well-paying district, and I have a great team of early childhood educators I get to work with. I get to focus on making the kids’ experience at school the best one they could possibly have.

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Mikia D. Frazier

Age: 27
Location: Hinesville, Georgia
Status: Still teaching
Salary: N/A

Can you give a brief overview of what you’ve taught over the past five years?

I have been extremely fortunate to continue teaching my favorite grade level, fourth grade, and my favorite subject, English language arts (ELA). Since starting my career, the dynamic of my department has changed a few times, so I’ve taught ELA by itself as well as ELA and social studies. Currently I am on a team of two [fourth grade teachers], so I teach ELA and social studies while my partner teaches math and science.

What has been the most challenging and rewarding part of your job?

The most challenging part of my job has been helping my students recover from the pandemic, in terms of educational progress and social-emotional development. My current fourth graders experienced “COVID learning” during their formative years of kindergarten and first grade. While they have been back to “regular school” for a few years, I can still see the social and emotional [gaps]. However, I do feel that they are making great strides.

Another challenging part of my job has been managing all that is expected of teachers inside and outside of the classroom. We wear so many hats and make so many decisions in a day. Our students, colleagues, communities and families need us to show up for them — all in different ways. Sometimes, it can get very overwhelming. Juggling being a teacher with being a full-time student has also been a very interesting feat. Since my first year teaching, I’ve earned two degrees — my master’s degree in 2020 and a specialist degree in 2022. I’m currently working toward my leadership certification and hope to begin a doctorate program soon. The balancing act is definitely a challenge, but I’m working extremely hard to achieve my personal and professional goals while continuing to enjoy the profession.

The most rewarding part of my job is, and will always be, the relationships that I build with my students. This year is definitely a full-circle moment, as I have realized that the first group of students I had when I entered the profession in 2019 is going to high school next year! Whenever I see them out and about in the community, they still talk about memories [from that year] and how I’m their favorite teacher. While teaching can be a very tough and demanding job, the children always find a way to remind me of my impact on their lives.

What has been the most surprising part of your teaching experience so far?

The most surprising part of my teaching experience thus far is the fact that being a teacher never stops. Of course, I always knew it was a full-time job. I knew that teachers spent weekends and late nights working on all of their school tasks. But I didn’t understand the reality that teaching becomes such a part of you, sometimes you can’t turn it off. I often catch myself randomly thinking about a new strategy to try or a new project to do. It surprises me that sometimes I simply just cannot turn it off.

How do you think starting your career during the height of COVID-19 shaped your teaching experience and approach?

Starting my career at the height of COVID literally altered my brain chemistry as an educator. It was as if one of the wildest things that could ever happen actually did. I learned in that first year that anything can happen, and we have to learn to adapt. We were thrown into an entirely different realm of education with no handbook. Most of us were building the plane as we were flying it, but ultimately we landed safely. That first school year showed me that teachers are capable of absolutely anything. I figured that if I could survive that, I could survive anything. The experience taught me to adapt, [helped me develop] an immense level of patience and it taught me that I could persevere through a lot.

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Steve Middleton

Age: 46
Location: San Antonio, Texas
Status: Still teaching
Starting salary: ~$56,000
Current salary: ~$58,000

Can you give a brief overview of what you’ve taught over the past five years?

Over the past five years, I've experienced both consistency and transitions in my teaching career. I started at one public middle school where I taught digital communications, and then moved to a different one in the district, called Bush Middle School. At Bush, I teach technology applications, computer science and robotics.

What has been the most challenging and rewarding part of your job?

In the past five years, the most challenging part of my job has been dealing with unsupportive colleagues at my previous school.

The most rewarding aspect has been implementing innovative strategies in my classes, such as starting a weekly email initiative in which students send an email home to their parents/guardians every Monday with an update about their learning. In the emails, students include a screenshot of their grades across all classes, two fun or interesting things from school, and a plan to complete any missing assignments. I’ve been doing this for about three years now, and it serves a few purposes. It breaks a negative cycle where parents only hear from their child’s school when something is wrong. It empowers students to take responsibility for their learning. It promotes transparency among students, teachers and families.

The weekly email is not schoolwide yet. However, word has gotten out, and my district has asked me to give a training on it to other technology teachers in the district for next school year.

What has been the most surprising part of your teaching experience so far?

The most surprising part of my teaching experience thus far has been witnessing the incredible resilience and determination of my students. Despite any challenges they may face, they continue to push forward and demonstrate their eagerness to learn. This unwavering dedication has been both humbling and inspiring, as it serves as a constant reminder that the work I do is ultimately about the students and their growth. Their perseverance has undoubtedly played a pivotal role in motivating me as an educator.

How do you think starting your career during the height of COVID-19 shaped your teaching experience and approach?

This unprecedented situation compelled me to think outside the box, develop innovative solutions and adapt to constantly changing circumstances. It also taught me that fostering independent learning skills in students must begin at an early age. The pandemic served as a powerful reminder that, just as I cannot drink water for them when they are thirsty, I cannot absorb knowledge on their behalf — the effort to learn must come from within.