AURORA, Colo. — Seven children gathered around Amaya Mills as the soon-to-be teacher asked them what activity they wanted to do next. Did they want to read to themselves? Or read with one of their classmates?

One after another, the first-graders scattered across the classroom at Ponderosa Elementary School in Aurora, settling down with books, computers and Play-Doh. Mills moved around the room that October morning, checking on the children as they completed their tasks.

The classroom is where she had wanted to be, but Mills wasn’t sure how to achieve her dream of being a teacher while juggling both work and school. She attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., for two years, but moved back to Colorado in 2020 because she couldn’t afford tuition.

Mills worked as a librarian at Village East Elementary School until she joined a new initiative — the Aspiring Educator Pathway Program — that the Cherry Creek School District launched during the 2024-25 academic year and which pays her to co-teach while she earns a degree.

“I always wanted to do something with kids,” Mills, 24, said, adding, “It’s something I wanted to do but I had no way to go about it without the program.”

The Cherry Creek School District launched the Aspiring Educator Pathway in hopes of solving Colorado’s growing teacher shortage and building a pipeline of educators for the district’s classrooms.

The district is spending $760,000 to pay 16 apprentices salary and benefits. The money comes from positions that are unfilled throughout the district, spokeswomen Ashley Verville said.

The program is akin to a medical residency, with future teachers getting trained inside Cherry Creek’s elementary and middle schools while they earn a bachelor’s degree from the Community College of Aurora.

The district pays participants an annual salary and benefits that total $47,500 as they complete their training and finish their education. And this year’s apprentices had their tuition fully covered via a grant from Career Advance Colorado, a state program that pays tuition and other fees for community college students studying to work in high-demand fields.

Cherry Creek’s new program follows state legislation in 2023 that allowed the Colorado Department of Education to develop an alternate route for people attaining their teaching licenses. Under the district’s program, participants receive their degree from the Community College of Aurora but their licensure comes from the Cherry Creek School District.

The initiative builds on another program at the district in which high school students work and are paid to be paraprofessionals, or teacher aids, in the district’s classrooms, Superintendent Chris Smith said.

“I do believe this is going to change the way we educate teachers to be teachers across the country,” he said.

Sixteen apprentices, including Mills, are currently participating in the program at seven schools in the district. Leaders of the Cherry Creek School District hope to expand the initiative so that 400 apprentices are participating in four years, Smith said.

The district will begin recruiting a new batch of apprentices for the program’s second year in January.

“There’s not as many teachers graduating from our teacher colleges,” Smith said. “…The cost of higher education is driving teachers away from the teaching profession because you don’t get into teaching to make a whole bunch of money. You get into teaching to make a difference in the lives of a whole bunch of kids.”

Widespread staffing shortages have persisted in Colorado districts since the start of the pandemic, making it difficult for schools to have enough teachers, bus drivers and substitutes.

Statewide, districts and Boards of Cooperative Educational Services — or BOCES, which provide educational services, including special education programs, to districts — reported 3,425 total staffing shortages during the 2023-24 academic year. Nearly 70% of those shortages were for teachers, according to data from state education department.

Districts and BOCES had 2,388 teacher shortages last school year, almost double the 1,197 shortages districts reported five years earlier, the data showed. The teacher openings were either staffed by what the state calls a shortage mechanism, such as a long-term sub, or went unfilled.

“We have a growing and somewhat silent crisis around the teacher workforce,” said Van Schoales, senior policy director at the Keystone Policy Center, a nonprofit that conducts education research.

“There’s a zeitgeist that teaching sucks these days,” he said. “It’s perceived to be, and by many measures, it has gotten more difficult over time. The perceptions are that it’s not rewarding. The perceptions are that it’s harder to make a difference.”

Schools also have become a battleground for culture wars playing out across the country, as politicians, parents and educators debate how to teach topics such as race and gender identity.

And teacher wages haven’t kept up with rising housing costs or inflation, Schoales said.

Several districts, including those across metro Denver, increased employees’ wages in recent years. But educators have said they still can’t buy or rent homes in the districts where they teach. The problem is so pronounced that some districts, particularly those in Colorado’s high country, are becoming landlords and building tiny homes so that their teachers have places to live.

When teachers finish the Aspiring Educator Pathway program and stay to work in the Cherry Creek School District, they will receive the salary of a fifth-year teacher. This means their annual pay will start at $65,343, which is $4,000 more than if they were a first-year teacher, according to the district.

Educators who go through the program will receive a higher starting salary because they will have spent as many as four years in classrooms co-teaching with mentors. Apprentices will get more than 4,000 hours in the classroom, compared to the roughly 750 hours they would typically receive as student teachers through traditional programs, Smith said.

“Almost all of their time will be spent in our schools with the mentor co-teaching,” Smith said.

So, he said, not only is the program creating a pipeline of teachers, but also better preparing them to be in the classroom on their own than traditional programs.

The process to become a teacher “is old” and students spend much of their time learning the theory of education, he said.

But teaching isn’t just knowing how to help someone learn. A teacher also needs know how to plan lessons, manage a class and connect with students — skills that can only really be developed when a person is inside a classroom and working with children, Smith said.

And that, he said, is the benefit of the district’s new program.

Mills, the apprentice at Ponderosa Elementary, said that by being in the classroom, she’s not only getting to learn from a seasoned teacher, but she’s also building connections in the school and district. Most of her classes for her degree are online.

If it wasn’t for the program, Mills would still be a school librarian. Now, she said, she wants to teach first grade.

“I love my class,” she said. “It makes me really happy to be here.”

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