How a teacher program uses scholarships to bring educators to rural towns

Evictions can have devastating effects on a student’s access to education, forcing some to drop out of school. In Delhi, a city in India, a school was built by students, community members, and volunteers using locally-sourced materials. The community had been forcibly removed from their homes, and the students were left without a school.

The Brothers Empowered to Teach (BE2T) initiative recruits college-age people of color to teach in schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The fellowship program aims to build a workforce more representative of the races and backgrounds of students in local schools and provides a stipend to student-teachers as one additional way to help with the cost of college.

To address the persistent lack of minority teachers in Connecticut classrooms, the Capital Region Education Council has developed a teacher residency program. Local minority college graduates are paid to teach for a year in a classroom while taking intense coursework in the summers before and after.

Washington state is providing additional instruction and in some cases a path to teacher credentials for its 25,500 paraeducators who have stepped up to play roles sometimes equivalent or beyond that of credentialed teachers amidst a teacher shortage statewide. Paraeducators are often from the neighborhoods in which they teach and often comprise a more diverse pool of instructors than other educators.

Although only 16 percent of residents in Onalaska, Washington hold a bachelor's degree, all 43 seniors in the class of 2017 were accepted to college. Even as more students are college bound, in the past five years, the town's population has grown and the median age has decreased. So how is Onalaska fighting the "brain drain" that plagues other towns?

To diversify America's disproportionately female and white set of teachers, a coalition of colleges and universities is working to train black men to become teachers. The training programs emphasize the financial benefits and stability of a career in teaching.

Is there a way to frame conversations so that people actually listen to one another? Ask Big Questions fosters large group questions and discussions about social problems on university campuses to inspire young people.

Several state and local programs are emerging to fill the shoes of retiring doctors in the area, like the Advanced Nursing Education Workforce (ANEW) program. ANEW covers the cost of higher education for local nurses to become APRNs to then work as primary care nurse practitioners tto help address the lack of doctors and increase access to healthcare. So far, about 40 APRNs have graduated from the ANEWA program, 68% of which are from rural communities.

A dairy cooperative in Ukraine has brought jobs to farmers in the region and allowed them to work together to sell their milk on the market. An international nonprofit helped the Andriyivka Prosperity cooperative get off the ground. While villagers were skeptical of joining at first, and there are still challenges with operating the cooperative, there are 129 members that sell their milk. “The cooperative has halted the extinction of the village, allowing young people to stay in their homelands and have jobs and a livelihood,” says one of the villagers.

The Cherry Creek School district is using apprenticeships to create a more racially diverse pipeline of K-12 educators in Colorado. High school juniors and seniors are paid to participate in the apprenticeship, and are able to earn college credit as well. This is one of the ways the district is working on having its workforce reflect its student bodies more accurately. Currently 85% of teachers are white, and half of its student body is kids of color. Now in its second year, the program has grown from an initial cohort of 12 youth apprentices to 26,