Carl Brinkley is a big man with a booming, deep voice that is softened by his immaculate manners.
A former adjunct professor and grant writer for Delta State University’s College of Business and a graduate of that Master of Business Adminstration program, Brinkley is now pacersonnel director at the Greenwood Public School District.
Right now, with new college graduates about to enter the teaching marketplace, Brinkley is deeply engaged in finding new, qualified teachers to fill 23 open slots at the district.
That’s about one-eighth of the district’s teacher pool.
Of those teaching positions that need to be filled, nine represent employees who retired this year. The rest are either teachers not returning to their jobs for any number of reasons — moving, spouse taking a new job elsewhere, taking a different job themselves — or they represent slots that remain unfilled because they are in subject areas for which there are a shortage of teachers.
Take foreign languages, for example. At the district-wide parents meeting this school year, parents of upcoming and graduating seniors were told that the state’s foreign language requirement at Greenwood High School could be substituted with a course in world geography, due to the school not having a Spanish or French teacher.
On this Wednesday afternoon, Brinkley is meeting with Superintendent Jennifer Wilson to discuss strategies for recruiting new teachers.
Brinkley has an elementary-certified candidate at Jackson State University he wants to bring to Greenwood to look at teaching next year at Threadgill Elementary.
The young teacher is a participant in the Clemson University-founded Call Me MISTER program, designed to encourage more young men to enter teaching by offering them financial incentives, academic support and mentoring during their college years.
This particular recruit, an African-American from Indianapolis, has a Mississippi driver’s license but no car, so Brinkley is trying to figure out how to get him to Greenwood.
“If I have to go to Jackson and pick him up, I will,” he said. “I really want to get this one down here.”
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The Greenwood district is just one of 48 in the state of Mississippi with an officially designated critical teaching shortage. That’s about a third of the districts in the state.
Add to that the problem of being a rural district with its own unique challenges attracting young teachers, like a lack of night life and entertainment options — not even a movie theater or a coffee shop — limited housing options and the looming specter of isolation while being far away from family.
And like most of the state’s 48 critical-needs districts, Greenwood’s is also a low-performing district with high-needs students.
Add to that a teaching shortage in the whole state, and a looming shortage across the nation as baby boomers retire, and you’ve got a dramatic case of demand exceeding supply.
Mississippi has passed legislation to help remedy the problem for critical shortage districts, offering loan deferments to teachers who agree to work in those districts, tuition breaks, scholarship and fellowship programs, moving reimbursement, and even a housing program that will pay up to $6,000 on the down payment for a house.
But those programs, designed to help college students who’ve already decided to go into teaching, don’t begin to address the problem of students simply not going into teaching these days.
This year, Brinkley estimates, Mississippi colleges and universities will graduate about 400 potential teachers. Critical needs districts alone are in need of as many as 1,000 teachers.
Schools like Mississippi Valley State University and Delta State are pushing public relations campaigns now, aimed at getting students to consider teaching as a career option. These media campaigns tout the availability of jobs, the personal benefits of working a school year calendar (187 days per year in Greenwood) and the importance of serving communities by preparing children for the future.
“It’s a noble profession,” Brinkley said. “You can genuinely make a difference in someone’s life.”
The starting salary in Greenwood for a certified teacher is $35,710, and teachers who pursue and attain national teacher certification can enhance that salary by $10,000 per year.
But news of under-funded and under-performing schools, the proliferation of standardized testing and the general decline of public education, especially in a state like Mississippi that suffers from chronic under-funding, has influenced the career decisions of a generation of college grads, and that’s hard to overcome.
Brinkley said that to attract new teachers to Greenwood, the district has to be aggressive, innovative and quick.
Every other school out there, as well as every other state, is competing for the same small pool of talent.
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Wilson and Brinkley have been courting local businesses to donate funds that would be used as signing bonuses to lure new teachers to the district.
“I can’t say who has committed at this point, but we have talked to several businesses and banks in the community who’ve said they will help,” Wilson said.
These unofficial commitments, if they become official, would make it possible for the district to offer a $3,000 signing bonus to a teacher who chooses Greenwood.
The competition is fierce, Brinkley said.
“We don’t just have competition from Jackson and Madison and other Mississippi districts, we have competition from California, Texas, Atlanta and Chicago,” he said.
It’s not uncommon at a teacher recruiting fair, like one he attended recently in Jackson, for recruiters to offer to fly Mississipi graduates out to their state for interviews and to pay for the visit.
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Beyond offering attractive financial incentives and appealing to the social conscience of potential teachers, the Greenwood district and others like it rely heavily on alternative programs like Teach for America and the Mississippi Teacher Corps that place high-caliber college grads into low-performing rural schools.
But Teach for America, which used to have a large and visible presence in the Delta, is shrinking both nationally and inside Mississippi.
This year, Wilson said, Greenwood will receive no TFA teachers.
“There are only 80 in Mississippi, and none of them will be placed in Greenwood or Leflore County schools for 2017-18,” Wilson said. “They got requests for 1,100 placements.”
At the same time, the member rate that school districts pay to host TFA students has risen from $4,200 to $5,000, and state funding for Teach for America has shrunk from $6 million to $2 million.
To remedy that problem, Greenwood hopes to be the host site for new Teach for America recruits for the 2018-19 school year.
“We’re working on that,” Wilson said. “We believe that once we can get them to Greenwood and show them what we have here, more will want to teach here.” Currently, the Greenwood district has five first-year Teach for America teachers and five second-year teachers. Delta State University is working on implementing a master’s program in teaching that would allow Teach for America students to earn graduate credits for their practical experience in the classroom.
Greenwood has also recently renewed its partnership with the Mississippi Teacher Corps program out of University of Mississippi and hopes to get three teachers from it this year. MTC selects exceptional college graduates to teach in high-poverty public schools and provides training, support, certification, and a full scholarship for a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction.
Alternative teacher certification for people with degrees or professional experience in needed content areas are another way to fill slots in a district, but it’s a difficult route and the competition is equally as fierce.
Brinkley said he was recently at a recruitment fair where the state of Louisiana was recruiting college graduates in all subject areas, not just education grads, and offering to pay for their alternative certification if they would move to Louisiana and work as teachers.
But Brinkley is not deterred, nor is Wilson.
“Education drives the economy. Teachers are the mothers and fathers of the future,” Brinkley said. “It’s difficult, accountability is high and expectations are high. But it’s worth it.”
Wilson agreed.
“You can take one good solid teacher,” she said, “and they can be the match that starts the fire.”
• Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
