DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — Faced with a huge teacher shortage, the DeKalb County School District believes it has a solution for finding and retaining educators.
No one wants to take on more debt to go back to school.
A new program in the district is taking advantage of that to get qualified people in the door. Channel 2′s Tyisha Fernandes took a closer look at it.
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School leaders say the program also gets teachers in classrooms faster than the traditional way and the district is ready to ignite their school district by eliminating the annual teacher shortage problem.
DeKalb County administrators were all smiles Tuesday morning as they officially named Chapel Hill Middle School one of the training academies for their new teacher residency program.
It was a much different story at the end of last school year when DeKalb County had the worst teacher shortage in metro Atlanta.
Back in June, they needed 625 teachers.
Superintendent Dr. Devon Horton was new back then and said he had implemented a teacher residency program back at his old school district in another state.
He brought that same idea to DeKalb County and got the board to approve it in October.
Dr. Horton said he assembled a team that says this program is designed to get plenty of qualified people in the door, educate them, train them, and keep them.
The district partnered up with Middle Georgia University and a recruiting company who are screening 600 applicants.
Maleah Boyd has always wanted to go back to school and become a certified teacher.
“I’m a paraprofessional in Rockdale,” Boyd said. “And once this opportunity came across my desk I said, ‘Yeah! This is it!’” I get to get my masters and certification while also working hand-in-hand on-site with students and teachers.”
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Leah Thomas is also a paraprofessional.
She graduated from Chapel Hill Middle School, so she’s excited about giving back to students there and getting certified this way.
“We’ll be better prepared. The retention rate will hopefully stay or grow and we’ll just have better planning. So I’m excited and I’m ready to go,” Thomas said.
Currently the district has 156 vacancies, so they drastically improved from 625 vacancies.
The next round of trainees are expected to be selected by June of 2024.
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