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As school districts up and down the state struggle to hire new teachers because of a statewide teacher shortage, local districts are having to come up with innovative ways to recruit and retain teachers.

“It’s a competition for a scarce resource in terms of human capital that all districts have to find creative solutions, and this is one that we’ve developed,” said P.K. Diffenbaugh, the superintendent for the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District.

The solution Diffenbaugh is talking about is a partnership with a Bay Area graduate school that offers a teacher residency for future educators.

Tnaya Scott, a kindergarten teacher at Del Rey Woods Elementary School, says she probably wouldn’t be a teacher had it not been for the program.

“I don’t think so, because I definitely always wanted to work with kids, but I just didn’t feel like I had the time or the resources to actually, like, do a teaching program and go through all of that,” Scott said.

Under the partnership with the Alder Graduate School of Education, prospective teachers earn a master’s degree and teaching credential all in a year, while getting paid and getting hands-on experience in a classroom. Students of the program have teaching experience, so when they graduate, they hit the ground running.

“So you’re in the classroom full time with a mentor teacher full time, so you’re experiencing the start of the school year, you’re experiencing how do you roll out classroom culture, how do you have classroom management. You’re being able to bounce ideas off instead of just coming in like cold turkey and like, ‘OK, what do I do?’” said Scott.

In the five years since the district started the partnership, they’ve hired, on average, 20 teachers a year who have gone through the program. At Del Rey Woods Elementary, about half of the teachers are Alder graduates. Many of them have been tapped from the community they grew up in, who then learn the MPUSD way of teaching.

“There’s nothing like getting trained with the system that you’re then going to use because then you already know how some of the technology works, you know who to call when you need assistance, you already have colleagues that you’ve developed relationships with. So that piece is already there in your very first year,” said Mariana Monge, the principal at Del Rey Woods Elementary School.

Tuition for the program is just under $22,000, but students get a $45,000 living stipend. Scholarships and loans are also available, and graduates get priority hiring for full-time positions in the MPUSD.

The district is currently taking applications for its next class of students, and a listening session has been scheduled for Dec. 12 at 4:30 p.m. For more information, contact the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District offices.

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