Latest news with #LEARN
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Lamont releases $2.5M in grants for regional education service centers
HARTFORD, Conn. (WTNH) — Governor Ned Lamont Tuesday announced over $2.5 million in state funding will go to two regional education service centers. He said the move is a step towards helping cities and towns reduce costs and find efficiencies. Lamont approves $3 million in funding for nonprofits 'These grants are yet another example of those efforts that are taking place throughout the whole of government to lower costs and reduce taxes. Working together we can make government work the way our taxpayers expect,' Lamont said in a statement. The funds are being released through Connecticut's Regional Performance Incentive Program, which gives grants to regional councils of governments and education service centers which help municipalities reduce costs. These grants will go to LEARN and EdAdvance. Gov. Ned Lamont pushes for more money for program aimed at getting disconnected youth back into school LEARN is southeastern Connecticut's regional education service center. The $1,295,941 grant going to them will be used to expand back-office support services to members districts, among other things. EdAdvance is northwestern Connecticut's regional education service center. They'll receive a $1,165,116 grant, which is expected to be used in part to expand their Regional Transportation Collaborative and improve transportation efficiency, reduce costs, and convert to electric vehicle (EV) technology. More information about the Regional Performance Incentive Program can be found on the State of Connecticut website. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Texas schools have leaned on uncertified teachers to fill vacancies. Lawmakers want to put a stop to it.
Lawmakers want to turn the tide on the growing number of unprepared and uncertified teachers by restricting who can lead Texas classrooms. But school leaders worry those limits will leave them with fewer options to refill their teacher ranks. Tucked inside the Texas House's $7.6 billion school finance package is a provision that would ban uncertified teachers from instructing core classes in public schools. House Bill 2 gives districts until fall 2026 to certify their K-5 math and reading teachers and until fall 2027 to certify teachers in other academic classes. Texas would help uncertified teachers pay for the cost of getting credentialed. Under HB 2, those who participate in an in-school training and mentoring program would receive a one-time $10,000 payment and those who go through a traditional university or alternative certification program would get $3,000. Special education and emergent bilingual teachers would get their certification fees waived. Educator training experts say it could be the biggest financial investment Texas made in teacher preparation. District leaders, once reluctant to hire uncertified teachers, now rely on them often to respond to the state's growing teacher shortage. And while they agree with the spirit of the legislation, some worry the bill would ask too much too soon of districts and doesn't offer a meaningful solution to replace uncertified teachers who leave the profession. 'What's going to happen when we're no longer able to hire uncertified teachers? Class sizes have to go up, programs have to disappear…. We won't have a choice,' said David Vroonland, director of the education research group LEARN and a former superintendent. 'There will be negative consequences if we don't put in place serious recruitment efforts.' Nowadays, superintendents often go to job fairs to recruit teachers and come out empty-handed. There are not as many Texans who want to be teachers as there used to be. The salary in Texas is about $9,000 less than the national average, so people choose better-paying careers. Teachers say they are overworked, sometimes navigating unwieldy class sizes and using weekends to catch up on grading. Heath Morrison started to see the pool of teacher applicants shrink years ago when he was at the helm of Montgomery ISD. Many teachers left the job during the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated the problem. 'This teacher shortage is getting more and more pronounced,' said Morrison, who is now the CEO of Teachers of Tomorrow, a popular alternative teacher certification program. 'The reality of most school districts across the country is you're not making a whole lot more money 10 years into your job than you were when you first entered … And so that becomes a deterrent.' As the pool of certified teachers shrunk, districts found a stopgap solution: bringing on uncertified teachers. Uncertified teachers accounted for roughly 38% of newly hired instructors last year, with many concentrated in rural districts. The Texas Legislature facilitated the flood of uncertified teachers. A 2015 law lets public schools get exemptions from requirements like teacher certification, school start dates and class sizes — the same exemptions allowed for open enrollment charter schools. Usually, to teach in Texas classrooms, candidates must obtain a certification by earning a bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university, completing an educator preparation program and passing teacher certification exams. Teacher preparation experts say certifications give teachers the tools to lead a high quality classroom. To pass certification tests, teaching candidates have to learn how to plan for lessons and manage discipline in a classroom. But the 2015 law allowed districts to hire uncertified teachers by presenting a so-called 'district of innovation plan' to show they were struggling to meet credential requirements because of a teacher shortage. By 2018, more than 600 rural and urban districts had gotten teacher certification exemptions. 'Now, what we've seen is everyone can demonstrate a shortage,' said Jacob Kirksey, a researcher at Texas Tech University. 'Almost every district in Texas is a district of innovation. That is what has allowed for the influx of uncertified teachers. Everybody is getting that waiver for certification requirements.' This session, House lawmakers are steadfast on undoing the loophole they created after new research from Kirksey sounded the alarm on the impacts of unprepared teachers on student learning. Students with new uncertified teachers lost about four months of learning in reading and three months in math, his analysis found. They missed class more than students with certified teachers, a signal of disengagement. Uncertified teachers are also less likely to stick with the job long-term, disrupting school stability. 'The state should act urgently on how to address the number of uncertified teachers in classrooms,' said Kate Greer, a policy director at Commit Partnership. The bill 'rights a wrong that we've had in the state for a long time.' Rep. Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican who sits on the House Public Education Committee, said his wife has worked as an uncertified art teacher at Allen ISD. She started a program to get certified this winter and had to pay $5,000 out of pocket. That cost may be 'not only a hurdle but an impediment for someone who wants to teach and is called and equipped to teach,' Leach said earlier this month during a committee hearing on HB 2. House lawmakers are proposing to lower the financial barriers that keep Texans who want to become teachers from getting certified. 'Quality preparation takes longer, is harder and it's more expensive. In the past, we've given [uncertified candidates] an opportunity just to walk into the classroom,' said Jean Streepey, the chair of the State Board for Educator Certification. 'How do we help teachers at the beginning of their journey to choose something that's longer, harder and more expensive?' Streepey sat on the teacher vacancy task force that Gov. Greg Abbott established in 2022 to recommend fixes to retention and recruitment challenges at Texas schools. The task force's recommendations, such as prioritizing raises and improving training, have fingerprints all over the Texas House's school finance package. Under HB 2, districts would see money flow in when they put uncertified teachers on the path to certification. And those financial rewards would be higher depending on the quality of the certification program. Schools with instructors who complete yearlong teacher residencies — which include classroom training and are widely seen as the gold standard for preparing teacher candidates — would receive bigger financial rewards than those with teachers who finish traditional university or alternative certification programs. Even with the financial help, lawmakers are making a tall order. In two years, the more than 35,000 uncertified teachers in the state would have to get their credential or be replaced with new, certified teachers. 'The shortages have grown to be so great that I think none of us have a really firm handle on the measures that it's going to take to turn things around.' said Michael Marder, the executive director of UTeach, a UT-Austin teacher preparatory program. 'There is financial support in HB 2 to try to move us back towards the previous situation. However, I just don't know whether the amounts that are laid out there are sufficient.' Only one in five uncertified teachers from 2017 to 2020 went on to get a credential within their first three years of teaching. Texas can expect a jump in uncertified teachers going through teacher preparatory programs because of the financial resources and pressure on schools through HB 2, Marder said. But for every teacher who does not get credentialed, school leaders will have to go out and find new teachers. And they will have to look from a smaller pool. The restrictions on uncertified teachers 'handcuffs us,'said Gilbert Trevino, the superintendent at Floydada Collegiate ISD, which sits in a rural farming town in West Texas. In recent years, recruiters with his district have gone out to job fairs and hired uncertified teachers with a college degree and field experience in the subjects they want to teach in. Rural schools across the state have acutely experienced the challenges of the teacher shortage — and have leaned on uncertified teachers more heavily than their urban peers. 'We have to recruit locally and grow our own or hire people who have connections or roots in the community,' Trevino said. 'If we hire a teacher straight out of Texas Tech University, we may have them for a year. … And then they may get on at Lubbock ISD or Plainview ISD, where there's more of a social life.' Floydada Collegiate ISD recruits local high school students who are working toward their associate's degree through what is known as a Grown Your Own Teacher program. But Trevino says HB 2 does not give him the time to use this program to replace uncertified teachers. From recruitment to graduation, it takes at least three years before students can lead a classroom on their own, he said. School leaders fear if they can't fill all their vacancies, they'll be pushed to increase class sizes or ask their teachers to prepare lessons for multiple subjects. 'Our smaller districts are already doing that, where teachers have multiple preps,' Trevino said. 'Things are already hard on our teachers. So if you add more to their plate, how likely are they to remain in the profession or remain in this district?' At Wylie ISD, which sits in Collin County, one of the fastest-growing counties in the country, it's been difficult to find teachers to keep up with student growth. Uncertified teachers in recent years have made up a large number of teacher applicants, according to Cameron Wiley, a school board trustee. Wiley said restrictions on uncertified teachers is a 'good end goal' but would compound the district's struggles. 'It limits the pot of people that's already small to a smaller pot. That's just going to make it more difficult to recruit,' Wiley said. 'And if we have a hard time finding people to come in, or we're not allowed to hire certain people to take some of that pressure off, those class sizes are just going to get bigger.' Learning suffers when class sizes get too big because students are not able to get the attention they need. 'This bill, it's just another obstacle that we as districts are having to maneuver around and hurl over,' Wiley said. 'We're not addressing the root cause [recruitment]. We're just putting a Band-Aid on it right now.' Disclosure: Commit Partnership and Texas Tech University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here. We can't wait to welcome you to the 15th annual Texas Tribune Festival, Texas' breakout ideas and politics event happening Nov. 13–15 in downtown Austin. Step inside the conversations shaping the future of education, the economy, health care, energy, technology, public safety, culture, the arts and so much more. Hear from our CEO, Sonal Shah, on TribFest 2025. TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Preston preschool receives national accreditation
Preston — Like a student a little scared to look at their grade on a big test, Preston Veterans' Memorial School Principal Ray Bernier wanted to close his eyes as he opened the email last Friday to learn whether his school had passed a critical test after five years of studying. But the email from the National Association for the Education of Young Children sent the night of Feb. 6 said only that a decision had been made on Preston Veterans' Memorial School's application for preschool national accreditation. Bernier needed to log into his account to learn the decision. 'Accredited,' Bernier read. 'Pass. Pass. Pass' was noted on the various categories of the review. Staff reactions were a bit more jubilant over the school district's first-ever national recognition. 'We were very excited!' preschool teacher Zoe Geise said Tuesday. 'We went off, showing it to everyone. It's really pretty exciting.' Bernier pulled a stack of folders and clipped documents some 8 inches thick from a shelf to illustrate the work the preschool teachers and the entire school staff had done to attain accreditation. Preston partnered with the regional educational agency LEARN for the voluntary accreditation application. Lynn DePina, LEARN's accreditation, quality, improvement support staff employee, worked with Preston staff — including her daughter-in-law, Preston preschool teacher Jillian DePina — on the school's application. The review included every aspect of the preschool-through-fifth-grade school, from cleanliness of bathrooms and the work of the school health office to curriculum and interactions with parents. Preschool teacher Jillian DePina said the group even assessed the percentage of wall space in her classroom that was decorated with student art. It needed to be over 50% to meet the criteria. A NAEYC reviewer visited the school on Nov. 21 after Preston had completed all the paperwork for the school's application. Bernier said the inspector from Chicago was personable and chatty in greeting staff but instantly put on a stoic demeanor when she observed DePina's class. 'She watched me and went through my materials for two hours,' DePina said. 'She went through the closets and (storage) bins. It was very thorough.' The school this year has two preschool classes, each with 15 students ages 3 to 5, including special education students. The school had three classes last year, with teacher Christine McNeil helping with the accreditation application. She is teaching second grade this year. Para-educators Lisa Barile, Shante Talley, Dawn Stafega and Beth Bonosconi also played key roles. The full-day preschool day typically includes group play with building blocks, digital sketch pads, Play Dough and other craft materials. Students learn how to hold pencils and crayons and how to turn book pages as teachers read. Students learn to recognize and sound out letters and numbers, and some may advance to beginning reading. The students eat lunch with kindergarten students in the cafeteria and go outside for recess, weather permitting. That included playing in the snow this week. The state mandates free preschool for students with special needs, and Preston charges up to $4,000 per year for families enrolling non-special-needs children, with a sliding scale based on income. Establishing preschool classes in Preston has been an annual budget discussion for the past several years. Superintendent Roy Seitsinger's predecessor launched universal free preschool for two years before it was cut back to a tuition program. Seitsinger is a strong proponent of preschool to prepare young students for kindergarten and elementary school. He applauded the school for its hard work to attain the national recognition. 'Our passion, professionalism, hard work, and deep caring commitment to our students and their families are reflected in the team and Preston community effort and years of work it took to earn this national honor,' Seitsinger said in an email. Seitsinger told the Board of Education Monday that the work will continue to maintain the high standards in the accreditation and in five years to seek recertification. The celebration of the national accreditation will climax on the last day of school when the typical preschool 'stepping-up' ceremony will grow into a full-fledged party with a bounce house. Preston's celebration of national preschool accreditation came as Gov. Ned Lamont on Tuesday announced proposed legislation he said would 'implement the largest expansion of preschool access in Connecticut history.' Lamont proposed using $300 million from this year's state surplus to create a preschool endowment managed by the Office of the Treasurer, with up to 10% expended each year through the commissioner of the Office of Early Childhood to expand affordable preschool options for families. Portions of future state surpluses also would go into the endowment. Lamont said the goal is to make preschool available at no cost to families earning up to $100,000 per year and reduce costs for families earning between $100,000 and $150,000 per year to no more than $20 per day. The fund also would create 20,000 new preschool spaces in the state by 2032.
