In the D.C. region, education majors can often pick and choose where they want to work as school systems struggle to fill vacancies and vie for the top candidates.
Minority educators are in even higher demand in the increasingly diverse region that’s looking to find educators who look like their students.
On Tuesday morning, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona was at Bowie State University to speak with the future teachers and guidance counselors who were recipients of some of the more than $6 million in federal grant money available to future educators.
The visit was timed for National School Counseling Week, and it included a meeting with a group of graduate students working to become certified guidance counselors.
Last year, the school received $5 million in Mental Health Service Professional grants, which aim to increase the number of mental health professionals in high-need schools around the country.
“It was everything, honestly,” said Monica Chica, who graduated in December and is currently working as a community school coordinator in Laurel, Maryland. She hopes to become a guidance counselor in the next school year.
But for Chica, an immigrant from El Salvador who also supports her family financially, the cost of graduate school was a burden her whole family had to take on.
“There were semesters where I was only taking one class at a time because that was … the only thing that I could afford,” Chica said. “But then when the grant came in, I was able to pay to be a full-time student and graduate earlier — way earlier than I expected.”
She wanted to become a counselor because of her own experience. She arrived in the U.S. just over a decade ago and struggled to find a counselor she could speak with, much less connect with.
“And I remember thinking from there, the impact that having one person who looks like you and is able to communicate with you, has on the students,” Chica said.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Cardona both during a round table and as he met with students at the undergraduate and graduate level.
“We’re fighting to make the profession look like America,” Cardona told students in the Black Male Teacher Project. “Is that too much to ask? Where we have over 50% of our students across the country identify as students of color, I think we’re about 20% or less of our professional staff represent the diversity in our country.”
The students in the project Cardona met with were some of the recipients of a $1.5 million grant aimed at recruiting more minority educators.
It’s been a huge relief for students such as David Bryant, a 34-year-old sophomore who grew up wanting to be a teacher. But bad experiences growing up in Detroit led him to “let that dream die,” as he put it.
But when he started working with refugees in Morocco, he said, more than anything, they wanted to learn something from him, which reignited his drive to become a teacher.
“It’s paying for my whole college experience, which is, oh my goodness, probably close to $80,000 maybe,” said Bryant, who paid his own way through his freshman year.
The scholarship he got after that year shocked him.
“I’m going to school for free. Yeah, it’s been amazing. And not just my tuition, but my books, my supplies. It has blessed me all those ways,” he said.
Cardona said the money is needed because, in many cases, “Black and brown students don’t have good experiences in schools. And we have to counteract that.”
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