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| Rural areas train own teachers
By MARTI MAGUIRE, Staff Writer
CLAYTON -- It would be tough to call what brought Al Batten to North Johnston High School 35 years ago a recruiting effort.
He had just returned to Johnston County from N.C. State University, where he studied agriculture. The principal asked Batten whether he would like to teach students about farming, and he said yes.
"It was a wonderful job in a wonderful place," said Batten, 57, who retired this year from the rural high school in northeastern Johnston County, where he once was a student.
These days, recruiting teachers is a more cosmopolitan affair, with representatives of Johnston schools jetting off to states such as Indiana and New York to find teachers. But unlike Batten, many of the recruits don't stick around.
Fourteen percent of Johnston teachers left the district this year, costing the system more than $1 million a year to recruit and train their replacements.
Some go to neighboring Wake County, where pay is higher. Others move to bigger cities or return to their hometowns after a few years in Johnston.
The problem has experts making efforts to produce more teachers with local ties. East Carolina University has sought to fill that niche for Johnston and other rural counties with a program that brings teacher education courses to community colleges.
Close to home
Most teachers will work within 50 miles of where they go to college, said Mike McLaughlin, who headed a 2004 study on teacher shortages for the N.C. Center for Public Policy Research. So programs that train teachers who already live near the schools that need them offer the best long-term solution to teacher shortages in rural counties, he said.
"Those teachers will stay longer because they're already in and aware of that community," McLaughlin said.
Now in its second full year, a program called Wachovia Partnership East offers four-year teaching degrees in elementary education and special education from ECU at Wayne, Craven and Edgecombe community colleges, in Eastern North Carolina.
The program will expand in May to offer classes for students who want to teach at middle schools.
"The rationale is to grow our own teachers," said Debbie Grady, who oversees the program at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro.
Students from six surrounding counties, including Johnston, travel to Goldsboro for evening classes once a week or less and do the rest of their work online. Similar programs offer classes to students in other eastern counties.
About 80 students are enrolled in the Wayne program, mostly from Johnston and Wayne counties. The first group will graduate in 2007.
Others are finishing their first two years of classes at their local community colleges and plan to transfer to Wayne Community College.
Many of them work as teacher's assistants, school secretaries or cafeteria workers. Most have to work during the day and would not have traveled to Raleigh or Greenville to get a four-year degree, Grady said.
'Fulfilling a dream'
Roxanne Wells makes the 20-minute trip from her home in Johnston County near the Wayne County line about once a month for her classes. She said she hopes to find a job teaching special-needs children at Johnston schools, a specialty in which the shortage of teachers is most dire.
A graduate of North Johnston High, she works as a teacher's assistant at Micro-Pine Level Elementary, where her son goes to school.
"I'm fulfilling a dream I've had for 20 years," she said of working toward her degree. "I can't wait to get in the classroom."
Local school officials are looking forward to a new crop of teachers like Wells.
School officials in Johnston County figure the teachers they recruit from out of state likely won't stick around for more than five years, said Robin Little, director of human relations for the district.
"If they stay here two years, three years, five years, then go home, we say 'Thank you very much,' " Little said. "That's five years those students had an excellent teacher."
Batten saw a parade of teachers march through in his last few years at North Johnston High, which pulls students from some of Johnston County's smallest towns and rural areas.
For the first 20 years, he said, he worked with a steady group of North Johnston alumni. But as they retired, their replacements didn't stay as long.
Batten timed his retirement so that another North Johnston alumnus could take over his job. "Unless I'm badly fooled," he said, "he'll stay."
Staff writer Marti Maguire can be reached at 829-4841 or mmaguire@newsobserver.com.
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