DENVER - The Centennial State has long had apprenticeship programs, Pell Grants and other training opportunities for workers - and the pandemic is prompting some new ones as well. Fighting COVID-19 could give some Coloradans an onramp to the health-care field.
The Colorado Public Health Workforce Collaborative aims to train thousands of workers, through contact-tracing apprenticeships that can lead to longer-term careers. Therese Ivancovich, executive director of the Denver Education Attainment Network, said it's one of many workforce development efforts.
"Thinking about these creative ways to embed work experience and the opportunities to give you that next leg up or that next up-skill is happening here in Colorado," said Ivancovich.
She pointed to another promising initiative, called "New Skills Ready." It's gotten $7 million in grant funding from JP Morgan Chase to cities, including Denver, to make job training part of education, from K-12 to post-secondary.
Jamie Merisotis, author of a new book on the future of the workforce and president of Lumina Foundation, said uniquely human traits and capabilities - skills that machines can't master - will be more important in the post-novel coronavirus work landscape.
At least one study estimates the jobs in 40% of COVID-related layoffs aren't coming back. Merisotis said the crisis is a chance to rethink education and workforce training.
"For workers who are looking at job loss right now," said Merisotis, "being able to get back into the learning environment, building your skillset and being able to develop those skills, will better position you for this environment of change going forward."
More than 740,000 unemployment claims have been filed in Colorado since March, and jobs overall have decreased by more than 130,000 since September a year ago.
Merisotis said because Black, Latino and Indigenous workers have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, workforce training must adapt to better serve these communities.
"We need to make sure that building our human work ecosystem takes those individuals into account and does a better job, frankly, than what we've done in the past," said Merisotis.
In a recent poll, 60% of Black respondents said their households face serious financial problems in the pandemic. So did 72% of Latino and 55% of Native American respondents, compared with 36% of Whites.
Support for this reporting was provided by Lumina Foundation.
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Education advocates are calling on lawmakers to increase funding for programs to combat the teacher shortage.
Around 37% of schools nationwide report being short at least one teacher. The problem is worse at schools serving high-poverty neighborhoods where more than half report a vacancy.
Susan Kemper Patrick, a senior researcher on the Educator Quality team at the Learning Policy Institute, said those numbers are troublingly high.
"At least 314,000 teaching positions across the U.S. are either unfilled or filled with teachers who are not fully certified for their assignments," she said. "This means at least one in ten teaching positions nationally are either unfilled or not filled with a certified teacher."
Data from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing showed 10,000 teacher vacancies in the 2021-22 school year. The number of teacher credentials issued that year was down 16% from the previous year - but has now started to trend upward.
In 2023, California passed a bill to make it easier for retired teachers to return to the classroom.
Kemper Patrick noted that schools are resorting to desperate measures such as combining classes, relying on a virtual teacher or using a long-term substitute.
"The U.S. Department of Education School Pulse survey found that 36% of public schools across the U.S. reported that they had to increase class size due to teacher and staff vacancies," she said.
Kemper Patrick blamed the problem on low salaries, noting the average starting salary for a teacher nationwide is less than $43,000 a year. Congress is currently considering two bills, the Diversify Act and the Educators for America Act, which would double the amount of the Teach America grant from $4,000 to $8,000 per year.
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It's estimated that nearly half of all schools in the country don't have enough teachers. To help change that, the University of Texas in El Paso offers a residency program to help ensure that first-time teachers succeed.
The "Miner Teacher Residency" gives students in the College of Education an opportunity to work in elementary and middle schools alongside working teachers.
Clifton Tanabe, dean of the UTEP College of Education, was part of a recent national roundtable discussion on ways to solve the teacher shortage, and said the program gives future educators the skills they need to be ready for their first day of class.
"A third grader in a first-year teacher's classroom is only going to get to do third grade once, but that teacher will be able to do the third grade again and again," he explained. "So, we want them ready for that first group of third graders that they take on."
Tanabe added nearly half of the students enrolled in the program are first-generation college students and 70% are bilingual. He adds that mirrors the population of students in the public school system in El Paso, where 90% of the students are Hispanic. Most of the new teachers remain in the area, he said.
Many school districts have been forced to leave positions open, or fill them with teachers who are not fully certified. Some rural Texas districts have gone to a four-day school week. And some teachers are leaving the profession, citing increased workloads, low pay and concerns about safety.
According to Tanabe, teacher retention is directly related to being successful in the first two years on the job - and the UT program addresses this.
"So, folks who graduate from our residency model in their first and second years in teaching are set up with an instructional coach who's from the university, from the College of Education, to work with them on individualized instructional improvement," he continued.
The residency program is in its sixth year. It currently has 62 teachers working in five different school districts in the El Paso area.
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Ohio's Black students are more likely to face excessively harsh discipline practices such as expulsion and suspension, according to a recently released report from the Children's Defense Fund of Ohio.
The data show out-of-school suspensions and expulsions rose in every grade level from kindergarten through twelfth grade in the 2022-23 school year, compared with the previous academic year.
John Standford, state director for the Children's Defense Fund of Ohio, said economically disadvantaged students comprised 83% of all out-of-school suspensions.
"School districts really have to pay closer attention to the data and really screen the data, review the data, on a regular basis to really begin to address the issues of inequities," Standford urged.
Last year saw 174,000 cases of total suspension or expulsion among low-income students compared to 35,000 cases among students who do not qualify as economically disadvantaged. According to the report, Black females in Ohio were six times more likely to receive out-of-school suspensions than their white female peers. Black males were also more than four times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white male peers.
Kim Eckhart, research manager for the fund, said she understands the difficulties teachers face. She hopes the report encourages districts across the state to support schools with the resources and time needed to address behavioral problems restoratively.
"We need schools to be supporting teachers with additional time and space," Eckhart contended. "So that there is capacity to address these things, rather than just kicking the student out of the class, kicking them out of the school."
School discipline practices are also linked to Ohio's alarmingly high chronic absenteeism rates. According to the report, missing as little as two days of school per month can lead to chronic absence. More than 26% of Ohio students -- more than 400,000 children -- were chronically absent from school in the 2022-2023 school year, up by nearly half from the 2018-19 school year.
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