Ashira Jones perched on a blue chair only slightly above the heads of the five kindergarteners who sat cross-legged on a rainbow carpet, rapt as she pointed to spelling words.

“What sound does Monday start with," she asked the students at KIPP Central City Primary in New Orleans. "Mmm," they responded in unison before drawing the letter M in the air with their fingers.

“Very good, now kiss your brains,” Jones told the students, who touched their hands to their lips and pressed them to their heads.

Jones is no ordinary first-year teacher.

She first got her taste of teaching as a high school student at KIPP, one of the city’s largest charter-school operators, through a program meant to recruit students into the teaching profession. Four years later, after graduating from Dillard University, she is starting her career in education— one of the first two participants in the program to go from KIPP student to teacher.

KIPP’s Alumni Teaching Force program is part of the organization’s long-term solution to addressing the teacher shortage, a recruitment challenge exacerbated by the pandemic. This year, nine New Orleans high schools have enrolled 135 students in “grow your own” teacher programs like KIPP’s, which give high schoolers teaching experience and a guaranteed job after college.

Many schools view such programs, which are spreading nationally, as a way to create a pipeline of future educators who can relate to their students and are less likely to quit.

“We are breeding local talent right in our own backyard that is deeply rooted in our community and in our schools and our students,” said Jahquille Ross, chief of talent for New Schools for New Orleans, an education nonprofit. “This is worth investing in.”

Not enough teachers 

Like many other urban districts across the country, New Orleans has struggled to recruit and retain enough teachers.

Across Louisiana, hiring and retention have crept up in recent years, but there were still about 1,146 teacher vacancies throughout the state in April, according to state data. Ross said New Orleans is typically about 250 teachers short each year

About 73% of teachers in New Orleans return year-to-year. Ross said the district aims for an 80% retention rate to “stabilize the system.” In an NSNO poll of departing educators, teachers cited low pay, increased workload since the pandemic and issues with direct supervisors or school leaders as top reasons for leaving the profession.

Officials have turned to a variety of strategies to stem the problem. Two years ago, Tulane University School of Professional Advancement, New Schools for New Orleans and several other education partners were awarded a $10 million federal grant to invest in recruitment and retention.

Those funds allowed them to expand grow-your-own programs to more schools, invest in teacher preparation programs with low enrollment and help career-changers and paraprofessionals get certified as teachers, Ross said.

The investment in grow your own strategies, which focus on recruiting people from within the community, comes as support for other longtime teacher recruitment programs seems to have shifted. This year, lawmakers vetoed the $500,000 they typically give to Teach for America, a national program that recruits recent college graduates to teach for at least two years. The program had already been shrinking, with just 50 teachers in the Greater New Orleans area participating in the program this year compared with 375 a decade earlier.

Though it may take years to see definitive results from high school recruitment programs, proponents expect a big payoff. School leaders have noticed that teachers who are people of color and from New Orleans tend to stay longer, Ross said. About 76% of New Orleans’ teachers are currently people of color, Ross said, compared to about 93% of students.

Taylor Williams, director of talent for NSNO, said schools across the city have expressed interest.

“You can create your own pipeline for your schools,” Williams said. “But also it's aiding in students going to college and completing college, because they know once they come back and return, they'll have a job at their old school.”

Recruiting starts early

Jones didn’t consider becoming a teacher until her senior year of high school. She needed another elective to graduate, so she enrolled in the the grow-your-own course.

Even after that year teaching Spanish to 9th and 10th graders at Booker T. Washington, she said, she entered college as a biology major. But Scarlett Cornelius, director of talent pipeline for KIPP New Orleans, kept calling. She hired Jones to help teach summer school at KIPP and, during her senior year, Jones worked for the Alumni Teacher Force helping high school student-teachers learn to give lessons.

On Thursday, watching Jones teach students of her own moved Cornelius to tears.

"She's just so comfortable," Cornelius said. "That's so rare for a first-year teacher."

KIPP started the program in 2019 after noticing a large portion of their teachers already came from the community, Cornelius said.

In its first year, 17 KIPP students signed up to be teachers, taking a class about education in their schools and getting classroom experience twice a week. Now the program has 50 high schoolers from Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass High School and John F. Kennedy High School.

Cornelius regularly checks in with past participants who are now in college. She said if about 20% of participants return to KIPP after college, they would consider it a successful recruitment strategy. Next year, they expect 36% of students to return.

“This is the way to invest in your people,” Cornelius said. “We give you lots of opportunities — or ‘at bats’ as we call them in teaching — lots of opportunities to practice so that when you've graduated, you have a leg up.”

Jones said she sees grow your own programs as part of the solution to the teacher shortage by exposing students to the profession.

“You never know what somebody will be like,” she said. “‘Oh I actually like this. I'm going to do it.’”

Jones said she hopes to stay in teaching until at least her kindergarten class graduates from 5th grade.

“I want to see this class graduate to middle school,” she said. “But knowing them, I may stay longer.”

Editor's note: This story was updated to clarify the number of teachers participating in the Teach For America program in the New Orleans area this year.