You've probably heard about a shortage of teachers, shrinking rosters and growing class sizes. But you may not know about how many steps, and how many different tests, students have to go through to become certified educators.
Ashley Stastny is a junior music education student at Bradley University. She spends two days a week with Kindergarten through fourth-grade students, getting a handle on the task of teaching kids.
“So, this year I will be doing novice teaching and just those core classes to help me build my skills as an educator,” she said. “And then next year is really just solidifying everything, putting it into practice, doing that now. But also, in a year and a half from now, I will be doing my student teaching and just being in the classroom and helping my students.”
Stastny says she experienced some friction getting into the field of education, but was set on what she wanted. As time went on, the needs became more practical: professional clothes for clinical observation sessions being one of them.
Linda Wilson is the director of Peoria Grow Your Own, an organization that provides monthly meetings for future educators.
“We talk about a variety of subjects, de-escalation strategies, some core things that are going on in the community. Things that will also support them, student loan debt, those kinds of things,” she said.
Currently, Grow Your Own is working with a cohort of 20 students at various stages of becoming a teacher.
Last year, the organization was able to offer some additional assistance.
“There was a need for our candidates to have support for professional clothing,” Wilson said. “Our candidates are going out into our Peoria Public Schools and they want to feel confident.”
Candidates like Stastny received part of a $5,000 grant from the Women's Fund of the Community Foundation of Central Illinois. Wilson says nine women received funding to help with pressing needs like gas, clothing, transportation and childcare.
Stastny says she believes support like the grant makes it possible for her and others in her cohort to become teachers.
“I mean, I wear those clothes every single time that I go into school,” she said. “It was just great to know that I am a part of something that is able to let me afford something that is going to help me in my teaching.”
Wilson says programs like Grow Your Own, and the assistance they can give to overcome barriers to the profession, not only help classrooms be more diverse, but create teachers who really understand a community's needs.
“These are the folks that students see at schools. They see them at the grocery store, or at church, or volunteering throughout the community,” she said. “And so, these are the folks that are going to be here and have an everlasting impact on their lives.”
Impacting student's lives, Wilson says, means improving the overall quality of the community for everyone, as those students mature and become members of the community themselves. 11 students who started out in the Grow Your Own program are still teaching today in Peoria Public Schools.
However, as Wilson points out, there isn't an abundance of grants like the one received last year to provide these opportunities. But they find other ways to support the cohort, primarily through donated funds.
“We did have a candidate that lost housing and we were able to provide a deposit for her,” Wilson said. “We had a candidate also that has been without income because she’s been student teaching full days. So we were able to pay some of her bills that had been mounting as well.”
Even when teaching candidate Ashley Stastny doesn't have material needs the organization can help out with, Grow Your Own provides another important benefit: a sense of community.
“When I found this program, it was really helpful for me to talk to people who looked like me,” she said. “And be able to really show that diverse side of how education, or how diversity is so important in education.”
One day, Stastny hopes she may inspire a student to become a teacher, just like her fourth grade band director did for her.
