Many of FWISD’s next round of new teachers could be a long way from home. Here’s why.

As officials in the Fort Worth Independent School District look to replace the large number of teachers leaving the classroom, they’re turning to a new source for help: educators from overseas.

Fort Worth ISD officials began recruiting international teachers for hard-to-fill jobs last year. This year, they’re stepping up those efforts, seeking more educators from outside the United States for subjects like math and science, as well as bilingual and special education.

The district isn’t alone. U.S. State Department figures show school districts in Texas and nationwide are increasingly looking abroad to fill vacant teaching positions. Fort Worth district officials say it’s one of many avenues they’re exploring to get qualified teachers into classrooms.

“We’re trying to expand our horizons and offer opportunities to those people that want to commit to serving our students,” said Raúl Peña, the district’s chief talent officer.

U.S., Texas schools increasingly turn to international teachers

For the past several years, U.S. school districts have brought in a steadily growing number of foreign teachers on J-1 visas, which allow teachers to live in the country and work for up to five years, according to U.S. State Department records. Between 2016 and 2022, the number of J-1 visas granted to teachers coming into the United States more than doubled, climbing from 2,662 in 2016 to 5,774 last year. The number of teachers coming into the country on J-1 visas plummeted to 398 in 2020, the year the pandemic reached the United States. Last year, the largest number of teachers granted J-1 visas to work in the United States came from the Philippines, Jamaica, Spain and Colombia.

The picture in Texas has mirrored national trends: From 2021 to 2022, the number of teachers coming to work in the state on J-1 visas has more than doubled, climbing from 273 two years ago to 610 last year, State Department records show.

Fort Worth ISD began recruiting international teachers last spring, Peña said. But district officials only hired about a half dozen teachers from overseas for the current school year. This year, the district hopes to bring more into Fort Worth schools, he said. But the district is still maintaining the same standards it does for all new hires, he said.

“We’re not just taking anyone to come to the position,” he said. “We’re taking people that meet the criteria to be qualified teachers in the state.”

Peña said the district is looking to hire international candidates for teaching positions that districts always struggle to fill — bilingual education, special education and secondary math and science. Those areas are always a particular challenge because they require special certifications and content area expertise that not every teacher has, he said.

While the district’s primary reason for looking to hire teachers from overseas is to ensure that every student has a qualified teacher in their classroom, Peña said there are other benefits, as well. Teachers who come from outside the country may have an easier time building relationships with students whose families are also recent arrivals in the United States, he said. He pointed to Clifford Davis Elementary School, which is located in a neighborhood that’s home to a large number of refugee families. Students at Clifford Davis come from more than 30 different countries. It can be helpful for those students to see teachers in their school who look like them, he said.

Peña said he thinks the district could continue to recruit international candidates for several years to come. He noted that the Dallas Independent School District has made a practice of hiring teachers from outside the country for several years. He’s been in touch with universities in Mexico City and Colombia who say they have students who are proficient in English and are interested in teaching in the United States. Recruiting teachers from abroad won’t solve the teacher shortage by itself, he said. But as one strategy of many, he said it can help the district find qualified educators to fill vacant jobs.

Teachers in Africa, Asia, Latin America look to apply in FWISD

The district is looking to hire teachers on H1-B visas, which allow American employers to hire international workers who are credentialed to work in a number of specialized fields, including education, medicine and architecture. The visa allows the recipient to stay in the United States for three years. The federal government caps the number of H-1B visas it issues each year at 65,000. Another 20,000 are set aside for applicants with master’s degrees from American universities. Workers hoping to come to the United States on H1-B visas enter an electronic lottery. Those who are selected are invited to apply.

During an informational session held via Zoom on Feb. 8, about 300 participants listened as recruiter Linda Castillo acquainted them with a few of Fort Worth’s more prominent landmarks, including Billy Bob’s Texas, the Will Rogers Center and the Fort Worth Stockyards. Many of the participants were located in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America, but some listened in from farther afield. A number of participants called in from the Philippines, as well as a few from Tanzania, Zimbabwe and the United Arab Emirates.

One of those participants was Christiana Fatai, a high school economics teacher in Lagos, Nigeria. Before the presentation, Fatai looked over the requirements to get certified to teach in Texas to see if it was something she thought she could do. It’s a lengthy process, she learned. Applicants who already have degrees in education from colleges outside the United States have to submit their credentials to the Texas Education Agency for review. Then, they have to pass an exam on the subject matter they expect to teach, and another demonstrating English proficiency. Only then can they apply for a job with the district, at which point recruiters will screen their applications to see if they’re a good fit.

The school where Fatai teaches in Lagos uses a British curriculum that’s relatively common across the English-speaking world, but little-used in the United States. Being able to teach in Texas would give Fatai a chance to work with another curriculum and within an educational system that’s different from the one she’s used to, she said.

Fatai said she’d like to come to the United States to work for a few years, and then return to Nigeria to put that experience to work for her country’s education system. That international perspective would be helpful, she said, because Nigerian schools place heavy emphasis on preparing students to study abroad. It would be beneficial to understand the education systems in the countries where those students are headed, including the strengths and drawbacks of each one, she said.

Teacher in Bangkok looks to move closer to family in Texas

Another participant in the informational session was Rachel Polonio, an English language teacher at a French international school in Bangkok, Thailand. Polonio said she learned that the district was hiring international candidates when her sister, who lives in Denton, spotted a social media post about it and forwarded it to her.

Although she’s never lived here, Polonio has spent time visiting family in North Texas, she said. She likes that Fort Worth gives visitors a chance to experience the Texas identity. She especially loves the Fort Worth Stockyards.

But the last time Polonio visited the area, she had a shock. She and other family members flew in last December to visit her sister. She’d only ever visited the area in the summer, so she assumed that, while the summers were hot, winter would be milder. But when she stepped out of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, the cold took her by surprise.

“It was really extreme,” she said. “In summer, it was too hot. And then in December, it was freezing cold.”

If she did come to the United States to teach, it wouldn’t be Polonio’s first time getting acquainted with a new culture. Originally from the Philippines, Polonio moved to Thailand about 20 years ago and started her teaching career there. Because she already has family in North Texas, she expects a move to Fort Worth would be less of an adjustment.

But as much as Polonio likes the idea of coming to teach in Fort Worth, she isn’t sure she could make it work. The district is only sponsoring H-1B visas for the teachers themselves, not their families. That setup makes overseas work less attractive for families, she said. Unless she and her husband, who is also a teacher, both got jobs in the area and were selected in the visa lottery, she doubts it would be possible for her to come.

Number of foreign teachers likely to keep climbing, recruiter says

Anita Gupta, founder of the Houston-based international teacher recruiting firm USA Employment, said she’s seen a sharp uptick in the number of districts looking to hire teachers from overseas over the past few years. That demand has come from large, urban districts and smaller districts alike, she said. Demand is highest for teachers in math, science and special education, she said, although some districts are also looking to hire English and bilingual education teachers.

Gupta said she thinks districts have become more willing to hire teachers from overseas not only as a way to fill vacant positions, but also because they want students to be aware of what’s going on in other parts of the world. Schools are trying to prepare students to live in a world that is increasingly international, she said, and one way to do that is to have them work with teachers from outside the country.

But Gupta thinks the biggest factor driving that demand is the large number of teachers who have retired or switched careers since the beginning of the pandemic. In Texas alone, there are thousands of vacant teaching positions that districts are looking to fill, she said.

As long as teachers continue to feel burned out and leave the profession, Gupta expects school districts will continue to look beyond American shores for educators to replace them.