MANKATO — The South Central Service Cooperative has been awarded $836,000 over a three-year grant period to help mentor new teachers.
This comes as southern Minnesota continues to experience teacher shortages in areas such as special education and career and technical education.
The Statewide Teacher Mentorship Grants, announced by Gov. Tim Walz earlier this summer, will address those shortage areas while providing guidance to new teachers.
Dave Paschke, a teaching and learning specialist at the Co-op, said the organization plans to work with their member school districts on putting together mentor induction plans.
“We’re going to be doing training for mentors, coaches and school leaders as part of the grant. And then we have a number of different activities that we’re going to be doing to kind of learn how to work together and push things forward,” he said.
The mentorship program will have mentors working with two different types of new teachers: teachers who are new to a district but have been teaching for a while and teachers who are brand new to the profession.
“For teachers that are new to the district but have some experience, we want to assign a trained mentor to be working with that teacher for at least their first year of teaching in their new school district,” said Paschke, adding that the program will look at everything from community norms and classroom management to curriculum.
New to profession teachers will then be working with mentors for three years to complete a series of professional development activities.
This is the first time the Co-op has received a grant of this size for the effort; they were part of a pilot program with the Department of Education to work with three school districts this past year to prepare for the grant.
Those were New Ulm Public Schools, Madelia Public Schools and Tri-City United Public Schools.
Paschke said they highlighted teacher shortage areas in their grant application, particularly in three areas: special education, career and technical education and English as a second language fields.
“In all three of those cases, right now, there are shortages in southern Minnesota. It’s been hard to recruit high quality candidates over the last few years. A lot of it’s because there’s just not good teacher preparation programs out there, even. The number of programs that support career and technical education, special education, aren’t nearly what they used to be 10 years ago,” he said.
This comes as the Mankato school district has struggled with fewer applicants applying for teaching positions, Director of Administrative Services John Lustig said.
“We’re not unique in these areas, but special education teachers, that position, while we have fewer applicants in general for our teacher positions, special ed teaching positions are challenging to fill,” he said.
“Some of our more specialized teaching areas at our secondary level and some of those would be career/technical positions… or business-related classes, fewer people are coming out of higher ed with degrees to teach those classes.”
Lustig added that overall, regardless of license area, the district is experiencing fewer applicants for any position than they might have in the past.
Paschke said he hopes a long-term impact of the mentorship program is that it’ll attract teachers to the southern Minnesota area.
“I think part of the reason there are teacher shortages is because the teacher turnover rate for new teachers is pretty high, so we’re hoping that we can start to have the reputation in southern Minnesota that this is a really good place to teach and that you really get a lot of support as you get started,” he said.
“Hopefully that’ll help long-term attract candidates.”
Paschke added that research is clear that having good induction programs raises the chances of teachers staying in the profession by quite a bit.
Paschke said the Co-op has already started deploying mentors last year through the pilot program but has had around 60 or so mentors training during the summer to start this fall.