Over the past few weeks, the North Carolina legislators have worked their versions of the N.C. 2011-2012 budget. This legislature moves for the phasing out of the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Scholarship Program in the year 2012-2013.
This would mean the incoming class of N.C. Teaching Fellows would be the end of the program, and thus the end to North Carolina’s final attempt to recruit master teachers for its public schools.
After the N.C. General Assembly’s Appropriations Act of 2011 abolished the Millennium Teaching Scholarship Loan Program, the N.C. Teaching Fellows program remained as the last state-funded effort to recruit future college students to the teaching profession.
As these next rounds of budget cuts hit North Carolina, this recruitment attempt will disappear as easily as its predecessors. While this type of elimination may not seem to impact North Carolina as a whole, nothing could be farther from the truth.
The Teaching Fellows Program provides students with $6,500 a year, along with various program opportunities to better prepare students for their future careers in education. The N.C. Teaching Fellows Program, unlike the last cut of the Millennium Teaching Scholarship, provides students with a program component which better prepares them for educating their future students.
These types of training experiences included in the program component incorporate opportunities such as cross-campus networking and brainstorming on various techniques and strategies one could utilize in their potential classroom. Experiences like these are not offered inside a typical college education course.
The program impacts 16 campuses — one of which includes N.C. State, which remains one of the major campus programs in the entire state. The N.C. State Teaching Fellows Program lends its participation to numerous fundraisers on campus, including the organization and running of the Mega-Blood Drive. This program has also aided in the growth and development in N.C. State’s College of Education.
Many times, parents and citizens of North Carolina complain of N.C.’s low-ranking educational system, and of who is to blame—incompetent teachers. The Teaching Fellows Program provides the solution to this complaint with the training of competent teachers able to face the classroom with a different perspective on learning.
The products of the N.C. Teaching Fellows Program have positively impacted North Carolina public schools. In 2009-2010 there were three Teaching Fellows named Regional Teacher of the Year. An N.C. State graduate of the program served on the Board of Directors of the Public School Forum, the fourth to serve on the Board. In 2001, an ECU Teaching Fellow was named Disney’s National Teacher of the Year. This year a Fellow received national recognition for winning the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.
These recognitions demonstrate the best of the best of North Carolina’s public schools teachers, and how they have received a wealth of unique experiences and opportunities from this program—a program N.C. legislators are currently in the works of eliminating.
The proposed budget has already been sent to the governor, who has set a long laundry list of improvements for the legislators to take into consideration.
If we are to ever get out of this decline in public education we must invest in the training of our future educators. Our legislators must be reminded of this, for surely once they had a teacher that made a difference to them. Why should they deny a student the same opportunity to impact the youth of the future?
Editor’s Note: Trey Ferguson is part of the University’s N.C. Teaching Fellows Program.
