Stephanie Taplin drove more than 200 miles last weekend to Atlanta for a chance to fulfill a few items on her bucket list.
The Savannah educator was among nearly four dozen people Saturday vying for some 600 teaching positions in the opulent Middle Eastern oasis of Abu Dhabi. The educators sought jobs through Teach Away, a Toronto-based teacher recruiting and placement firm that is on a month-long swing across the U.S. and abroad to hire teachers for jobs in Abu Dhabi. Metro Atlanta is the first stop on the recruiting tour, which ends in late March in Dublin, Ireland.
"I'm looking forward to the experience," said Taplin, who taught middle school language arts for six years at Pembroke and served as a school administrator. She's now working on a master's in mental health counseling and said teaching abroad would enable her to finish her degree.
"This would give me an opportunity to do some more traveling and learn other cultures and realize other goals," Taplin said.
The pay and free housing isn't bad either.
Teachers working abroad in the Teach Away program are given two-year contracts and earn between $3,300 and $5,500 a month in tax-free U.S. dollars. They also receive a completion bonus equal to one month's salary per year, said Kelly Kargas, placement coordinator with Teach Away. All told, a teacher earning a top monthly salary could make $143,000 tax-free during a two-year contract. Teach Away also places teachers in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America and other parts of the Middle East. There's also free yearly airline tickets and health benefits.
That's a huge incentive for teaching veterans like metro Atlantan Charlene Sams and Andrea Brown of Marietta. Sams had 22 years of teaching experience when she was laid off from the Gwinnett County school system in May 2010. She said the economic downturn has made it seemingly impossible for her to find a teaching job here.
Friends who work in Dubai have constantly beckoned her to come abroad. She showed up Saturday at the Marriott in downtown Atlanta for that chance.
"I just want to broaden my horizon," said Sams, who is also a playwright.
"(The economy has) rebounded a little but it's still difficult to find what you want," said Brown, a teacher with 14 years of experience in pre-K and kindergarten. "There's added pressure to do more things and there's less time to do it."
More than 290,000 U.S. education jobs have vanished since 2008, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the last year alone, more than 20,000 teachers and administrators have applied for overseas jobs through Teach Away, an increase of 40 percent. The surge was even bigger in Georgia where the organization received about 1,500 applications -- up 400 percent from the year before.
Teach Away has hired 250 teachers from Georgia during the past three years.
The poor U.S. economy and the United Arab Emirate's need for English-speaking teachers to advance education reforms have boosted interest in overseas teaching jobs, said Ron Stalenberg, with the Abu Dhabi Education Council. The Abu Dhabi government is looking for hundreds of English-speaking teachers to work with students, many of whom only speak Arabic. The government wants students to become bilingual by becoming proficient in English. In addition to teachers, the Abu Dhabi government also is looking for English-speaking principals, advisors and other education professionals.
"The quality we've seen so far has been good," Stalenberg said of the group's Atlanta stop, its fifth year recruiting in the city.
While Abu Dhabi has pristine beaches and is a shopaholic's paradise, it has its drawbacks, including triple-digit sweltering heat. Women aren't required to wear burkas or other traditional Islamic garments but they are expected to wear long skirts and long-sleeved blouses in the classroom and dress conservatively while in the community, Karges said.
"You're going to have culture shock wherever you go," she said."It's a pretty progressive place and they're pretty open-minded."
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