Photo: www.bw.edu
BEREA - Baldwin Wallace University will reduce the cost of its accelerated math or science graduate teaching program to help fight Ohio's teacher shortage.
Baldwin Wallace's Math and Science teaching program received some help from the Ohio Department of Higher Education and the Ohio Department of Education with the scholarship program "Addressing the Educator Shortages." With this help, the cost will be zero for ten lucky students.
WTAM spoke to Gabriel Swarts, the Associate Dean at Baldwin Wallace, and asked for his opinion on why we have a shortage of teachers. Swarts the following reasons.
"This has been decades in the making. The baby boomer generation has made-up up a huge swath of our workforce in teaching, but at the same time, teachers' salaries have not risen with inflation since the 90s. Then on top of it, it's a highly politicized field these days, which is exacerbated by some of the shortages." Swarts went on to say
"In addition to that, they're echoes of covid and the pandemic and a disrupted economy putting itself back together, so people are retiring a lot earlier than they had anticipated based on some of the pressures and stresses from the economy, and that applies to teaching. But this is decades in the making, this shortage, and we have to act. There are less students coming into the programs now than there were in the early 2000s. There are less graduates coming out of the programs, and this is across the state. That’s why the ODE (Ohio Department of Education) and ODHE (Ohio Department of Higher Education) are putting up funding for this, as our universities, as our community partners, and our school districts need teachers in every field, and they need substitutes in every field."
Below is a graph based on a study by the National Center for Education Statistics showing a projection of the number of teachers in the US.
Photo: www.statista.com / nces.ed.gov
While Baldwin Wallace hopes Northeast Ohioans take advantage of the offer, the program is offered statewide.
You can learn more about the program by following the link HERE.
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