COLUMBIA — Jaynelle Bolton wanted to be a business major.
But that was before the 17-year-old Dreher High School student started student-teaching at A.C. Moore Elementary as part of a teacher cadet class. Now, inspired by her “love for the kids,” Bolton aims to study education at the University of South Carolina, like her Dreher teacher Michelle Powell did at Winthrop University years ago.
That same teacher preparation pipeline, putting students like Bolton and Powell through state teacher education programs, once filled a third of open teacher jobs in South Carolina school districts each year.
Not anymore.
This year, just under 17 percent of teacher hires in the state came from such programs, according to a November report from the Winthrop-based Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention and Advancement, which attributes the drop to fewer college students graduating with a degree eligible for teacher certification.
Districts hired 1,390 of such new teachers ahead of the 2023-24 school year, compared to 1,883 ahead of the 2013-14 year — even though the total number of teacher hires has increased by thousands as districts struggled to retain educators.
And while traditional teacher education programs still supply the bulk of South Carolina teachers new to the profession, the number of educators coming out of alternative preparation programs has increased by hundreds over the past decade.
That gradual shift comes as some would-be teachers look for training programs that are more accessible and affordable than traditional education bachelor’s degrees, according to Angela Baum, associate dean for academic affairs at the USC College of Education.
“Different people have different needs of how to access the preparation,” Baum said.
Staffing struggles
The increase in alternative preparation comes as schools across the country are "struggling to attract" people into education careers, said Derrick Hines, a former Columbia teacher and a USC Teacher Cadet college coordinator.
Such a struggle, particularly when combined with similar issues with retaining teachers already in the profession, has led South Carolina to five straight years of increasing job openings in its schools, with 1,613 teacher positions vacant at the start of 2023-24.
Teacher advocates and education scholars have pointed to educator pay and benefits, as well as the conflict-filled politics surrounding education, as fuel for those staffing woes.
Even some of the high school Teacher Cadet students Hines works with, such as the ones in Powell's Dreher High class, aren't immune from doubt about today's education world being a viable career path, Hines said — creating a need for more non-traditional pathways into the field to alleviate that "recruitment deficit."
Such alternatives are more accessible for people who already have non-teaching college degrees but want to change careers toward education, Baum said, since it means they don't have to go back to school for another degree. They can also be cheaper, with programs sometimes helping foot part of the costs.
"We do know there are people out there seeking other pathways," Baum said, while noting that it's hard to know how much that population has increased. "We're trying to be very responsive to that."
Dreher High School teacher Michelle Powell leads a teacher cadet class March 14 in Columbia.
Tina Ramos-McBride, who currently works as a special education teacher in Berkeley County, is one such person.
She grew up wanting to be a teacher, but instead became a clinical counselor and eventually found herself working as a special education assistant at Sangaree Elementary School.
But upon the urging of her schools’ administrators, and inspired by own special needs sons’ positive experiences in school, she applied to become a candidate in USC’s Carolina Collaborative for Alternative Preparation.
Known as CarolinaCAP, the program lets would-be teachers with a non-education bachelor’s degree earn their certification while working as the teacher of record in a classroom, while also completing some classwork and working with a teaching coach.
“Now I can't imagine not teaching,” Ramos-McBride said. She now works as a special education teacher at Sangaree Elementary. “I just really fell in love with education all over again, so this program kind of gave me a second chance at a new calling and a new purpose.”
After getting off the ground in 2020, CarolinaCAP now enrolls about 80 new candidates each year, according to its director Tria Grant. It's a three-year program that includes two classes and 10 "microcredentials" focused on individual teaching skills.
District- or university-based alternative preparation programs such as CarolinaCAP, or others based out of Columbia College, Converse College and some of the state's largest school districts, put 234 new teachers into South Carolina schools for the 2023-24 school year.
Those educators represent a quarter of the 882 new teachers who came into the profession through alternate certification pathways this year — up from 435 a decade ago.
Colleges still key pipelines
Even as more new teacher hires come from alternative preparation routes, the traditional pathway through college degrees is still the main source of teachers new to the profession for South Carolina, particularly when including graduates of out-of-state universities.
Academic leaders in S.C. education colleges stress that their programs are healthy — enrollment in the College of Charleston's Department of Teacher Education is holding steady, Tracey Hunter-Doniger, an associate professor and department chair, said. Freshman enrollment in USC's teacher education programs has seen an uptick over the last two years, according to Baum, and the university also introduced online programs for some education majors that are growing.
And even if they're producing fewer future S.C. teachers than they once were, education bachelor's programs like College of Charleston's still produce well-prepared future educators, Hunter-Doniger said.
Crucially, those College of Charleston graduates have real classroom experience before they're tasked with doing it full-time, thanks to extensive student-teaching partnerships with Lowcountry school districts. It's to gradually build experience and confidence leading students, in addition to the classroom-based curriculum.
Dreher High School teacher Michelle Powell works with students in her teacher cadet class in Columbia March 14.
"The gradual increase of amount of time (in the classroom) is vital to their confidence, their efficacy," Hunter-Doniger said. "You remember public speaking class, and how nerve-racking it is — now imagine that with a bunch of 10-year-olds. They're relentless."
Candidates in the CarolinaCAP program might not have that sort of preparation before they go into the classroom as a teacher of record, since they're still working through their coursework while also teaching.
But Grant, the program's director, pointed to most of its candidates already having non-teacher education experience, and said that candidates get support from their teaching coaches.
USC is also piloting a 20-spot residency program, launched in the summer of 2023, where residents spend a year with a teacher getting additional experience before getting their own classroom as a CarolinaCAP candidate.
Teaching local
Most of the candidates in the CarolinaCAP program, now working as lead classroom teachers, were already working at their districts in non-teaching roles before getting accepted into the program. That was the case for Ramos-McBride, who’s "definitely" planning to stay in Berkeley County after she finishes up her certification.
"I love being able to serve my community and work with my community," she said.
That commitment is what school administrators hope to hear, as teacher staffing struggles are further exacerbated by schools’ increasing struggle to retain teachers.
More and more teachers in the state aren’t returning to their jobs each year, data shows, with annual departure numbers now more than 2,000 teachers higher than a decade ago — though they've recovered some from 2022's peak.
And even as individual districts and the state legislature look towards teacher pay raises and various bonus schemes to stop their leaks, understaffed schools can leave students and remaining teachers in the lurch.
With fewer people in the pipeline, that can mean workload for those still in the classroom, according to Jennifer Garrett, the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention and Advancement's coordinator of research and program evaluation.
"The people who are there are having to take on more, and that work-life balance is tough," she said. "It's tough to maintain."
But even amid a tough teaching environment, some high schoolers like Bolton, the teacher cadet, still see entering that pipeline as a way to make a difference.
"I feel like, if they want to make a good change on the new generation, they do want to go into teaching," she said of her cohort.
