Georgia’s poorest schools will get three dozen trained “STEM” teachers next year because of a program financed by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
The organization pioneered the teacher-training program in Michigan and is bringing it to Georgia because of support from Gov. Nathan Deal, foundation president Arthur Levine said Tuesday at an event at the Capitol. High school teachers with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering or math are hard to come by, and this program intends to change that, by paying people with those backgrounds to get teaching degrees.
The students selected for the program have STEM degrees and are getting $30,000 fellowships to earn a teaching degree starting this year at one of three Georgia colleges: Kennesaw State University, Columbus State University and Piedmont College. The program will be expanded to Georgia State University and Mercer University next year. Starting then and over the subsequent three years, the program will expand to 60 students per year.
In exchange for the fellowship, the students agree to teach at a high-poverty school for three years. They will get hands-on experience at their selected school while in college and will be assigned a mentor who also teaches a STEM subject. Many teachers drop out of the profession early in their careers due to a lack of help confronting the day-to-day challenges of managing a classroom.
Often, the best STEM teachers gravitate to schools with low poverty, but Deal said high-poverty students deserve a quality education, too. He told the assembled future teachers: “When you go into the classroom, you don’t know whether or not you’re going to have a future president as one of your students. Giving them the opportunity for a good education is one of those key ingredients for the success of their future.”
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