To combat teacher shortage, Fort Worth-area schools look to grow their own. Here’s how.

A group of about a half dozen eighth-graders gathered around a math problem hanging on a wall in a school hallway Friday morning, trying to puzzle their way through it.

The problem asked students to figure out how many square feet of paint a man would need to paint the walls of his garden shed. After a few minutes of trying, the students called out to their teacher for help.

Logan Jeffiers finished walking another group through plotting a triangle on a graph and walked over. He talked the students through the formula for finding the lateral surface area of a building, reminding them of the difference between lateral and total surface area, which would also include the shed’s roof and floor. A few seconds later, the students had the answer.

“See?” Jeffiers told them. “You just did it!”

Jeffiers is a pre-algebra teacher and tennis coach at Medlin Middle School in the Northwest Independent School District. Although it’s his first year as a full-time teacher, Jeffiers isn’t new to the district. He spent most of last year teaching pre-calculus as a long-term substitute at Northwest High School. Now, a district program is paying for Jeffiers to complete his teaching certificate, allowing him to stay in the district as a teacher permanently. Teaching wasn’t his first career choice, but Jeffiers said he can see himself doing it for decades to come.

“This is the career,” Jeffiers said. “I could not be loving what I’m doing any more than I am right now.”

As school districts across Texas grapple with a shortage of teachers, many are looking to so-called Grow Your Own programs as part of the solution. Those programs, funded by grants from the Texas Education Agency, allow districts to pay for non-certified staff members like long-term substitutes, paraprofessionals and classroom aides to get certified to teach.

Although those programs are new and have only produced a few teachers so far, officials in Fort Worth-area school districts say they’re working to turn them into a bigger part of their recruiting strategies.

Northwest ISD looks to expand Grow Your Own teacher pool

Northwest ISD is the fastest-growing district in North Texas, and one of the fastest-growing districts in the state. The district has to hire hundreds of new teachers each year to keep up with that growth, said Kim Barker, the district’s assistant superintendent for human resources, and officials expect it will continue to do so for decades.

Northwest ISD launched its Grow Your Own program in the spring of 2022. At the moment, the program makes up only a small part of the district’s teacher recruiting picture, Barker said — the district hired just a half dozen teachers through the program last year. But officials hope to turn it into a major source of new teachers in the next few years. That effort will include expanding the number of students in the district’s teaching and learning career pathways, eventually leading to more students returning to the district as teachers after they graduate from college, she said.

Jeffiers came into the teaching profession in a roundabout way: Last year, he was a recent college graduate working in a FedEx Office store and trying to break into the sports broadcasting business, when he saw a job listing for a long-term substitute in a pre-calculus class at Northwest High School. He applied, and got the job.

While Jeffiers was working as a long-term substitute, he got some information from the district’s administration about the Grow Your Own program. It sounded like a good opportunity, he said, so he signed up. Soon after, he began taking online classes through the alternative certification program iTeach Texas. The courses cover topics like classroom management, maintaining a positive classroom environment and working with certain groups like English language learners. Now that he’s teaching full-time, the program also sends a representative to watch him teach and offer feedback.

Jeffiers said the training program allowed him to start the school year without feeling like he was floundering. But the first year was still a learning experience, he said, because even a good training program can’t completely replicate the experience of teaching.

“Until you’re the one leading the class and you are the primary voice in a room, you don’t really know what that’s going to be like,” he said.

TEA grant helps school districts grow their own teachers

Texas launched the Grow Your Own grant program in 2018. Jessica McLoughlin, director of educator standards, testing and preparation for TEA, said the program originally focused on helping rural school districts recruit teachers from within their own pools of students and non-certified employees, with the idea that teachers who come from smaller rural communities are more likely to stay there.

In 2021, in response to pandemic-related teacher shortages, the agency expanded funding for the program, opening it up to school districts statewide. That move was funded through a combination of federal COVID relief money and state education funding.

One option districts have is using grant money to create a sequence of high school courses that shows students what it’s like to be a teacher, McLoughlin said, the goal being that those students end up pursuing education as a long-term career. Districts can offer those classes as a dual-credit option, she said, which helps accelerate those students’ paths through college and back into the classroom.

Districts can also use grant money to pay for staff members like long-term substitutes and paraprofessionals to get certified to teach. In some cases, that could mean helping those students complete bachelor’s degrees; however, many of those candidates already have degrees but only lack teaching certificates. In those cases, districts typically partner with alternative certification programs to get those staff members certified.

TEA figures show that teachers who get their certificates through alternative certification programs are more likely to leave the classroom after only a few years than those who go through a four-year program at a college of education. McLoughlin said the agency doesn’t have data showing whether that trend is the same among those who served as school support staff members before getting their teaching certificates.

But McLoughlin said when a district recruits a long-term substitute or paraprofessional to get certified to teach, that teaching candidate starts their career with a deep understanding of the school district and the community. That experience and understanding puts those educators on firmer footing than other brand-new teachers starting their careers in the district, she said.

Fort Worth ISD develops its own teachers as part of broader strategy

The Fort Worth Independent School District launched a Grow Your Own program last year, focusing on recruiting teachers for high-need areas like bilingual education and special education. In the program’s first cohort, 16 district employees earned their teaching certificates through the Region 11 Education Service Center. Before beginning the program, those employees signed an agreement with the district saying they would stay and teach in Fort Worth ISD for at least three school years.

Raúl Peña, Fort Worth ISD’s chief talent officer, told the Star-Telegram last month that the program is one of several strategies the district is using to get teachers into classrooms. Peña said the pandemic upended the labor market for teachers, forcing school districts to get creative to recruit high-quality educators. The Grow Your Own program is a good option, he said, because it gives the district a way to develop its workforce while showing current employees that it values them.

Mary Catherine Hannah, a teacher at Jo Kelly School in Fort Worth ISD, is one of the program’s newest teachers. A music therapist by training, Hannah had worked as a teacher assistant at Jo Kelly, which serves medically fragile students with severe disabilities. She expected that to be a short-term job that she would do until something else came along. But when she met the students at Jo Kelly, she knew she wanted to stay there.

Hannah came into the program last May, which gave her only a few months to do the coursework she would need to complete before school began in August. Other than a few classes conducted over Zoom, most of the work was self-paced, she said. Supervisors checked in on her periodically to see how she was doing, she said.

Teacher assistants tend to be “very, very hands-on” at Jo Kelly, Hannah said, so she already had a lot of experience working with students there before she started as a teacher. Where the transition was more difficult was when she had to find ways to balance working with students with all the other parts of the job, she said. She had training on teaching special education, but it didn’t cover things like grading and documenting students’ progress. But Hannah said she got plenty of support from program supervisors and her mentor teacher along the way, and she feels prepared to go into a second year of teaching on her own.

“They definitely didn’t just throw you in and forget about you,” she said.

Crowley ISD follows up with now-certified former students

Pam Berry, chief of human capital management at Crowley ISD, said the district has had a Grow Your Own program for students for about five years. The district’s career and technical education program has a teacher education pathway. When students in that program reach their senior year of high school, school leaders talk to them about where they plan to go to college and offer them a contract saying that when they graduate with a bachelor’s degree and a teaching certificate, they’ll come back to teach in the district, she said. The district is just now reaching the point where it’s following up with those students as they graduate from college, she said.

“We ran into a few at the job fairs that we attend, and we’re saying, no, contract means contract, really!” Berry said.

More recently, the district received a separate grant to set up a pipeline for paraprofessionals in the district to get certified to teach. The district partners with Texas A&M University-Commerce for those certifications, Berry said. For some employees, that process includes finishing up a bachelor’s degree in addition to earning a teaching certificate, she said, but in any case, the program covers the entire cost.

At the moment, Grow Your Own represents only a small piece of the district’s teacher recruiting efforts, Berry said. Leaders are hoping to find money in the district’s budget to expand the program beyond what the TEA grant will cover, she said.

“We’re always looking to think outside the box to bring any quality educators to be in front of our kids,” she said.

Northwest ISD teacher learns valuable lessons in first year

Back at Medlin Middle School, Logan Jeffiers’ students were finishing up their work for the hour when one student asked Jeffiers a question that didn’t have anything to do with math.

“Coach, did you go to college to be a teacher?” she asked.

“No, I went to college for communications,” he said.

“So why are you a teacher?” she asked.

“We can talk about it during Pride,” Jeffiers said, referring to the school’s advisory period. “Right now, I need you working.”

Looking back on his first year as a full-time teacher, Jeffiers can easily see the things he learned along the way. It’s important for teachers to have a deep knowledge of the subjects they’re teaching, he said, but it’s just as important for them to understand how to lead classroom discussions and ask questions that help students arrive at the right answers themselves.

It’s also important for teachers to take the time to build good relationships with their students, he said. Students often have more going on in their lives outside of school than teachers know about, he said, and it’s important that they see their teachers as trusted adults to whom they can turn when they need to talk.

When he made the decision nearly two years ago to take a long-term substitute teaching job, Jeffiers expected it would turn into a long-term career move. With about a month left in his first year as a full-time teacher, Jeffiers is even more sure of his decision than he was at the beginning.

“Now that I’m sitting here, I am loving every second of it,” he said. “I can’t picture myself doing anything else.”