$3.5 million grant provides $5,000 scholarships to eligible teachers

Janel Shoun | 

Thanks to a $3.5 million federal grant, the State of Tennessee is offering $5,000 scholarships to Lipscomb University’s two newest education master’s programs for eligible teachers in nine high-need school systems, including Nashville.

The scholarships are available to Nashville teachers now working on alternative licensure or waivers who would like to become “highly qualified” in one of five federally designated high-need content areas – math, science, special education, foreign language and ESL (English as a Second Language) – and earn their master’s degree in education at the same time. Recipients must commit to teach for three years in a Tennessee high-need school system.

The Transition to Teaching scholarships, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, are available for participants in Lipscomb’s Master’s of Arts in Learning and Teaching (MALT) and the Master’s of Arts in Special Education (MASE) programs. These two programs are offered by Lipscomb-LCI, an incorporated non-profit joint venture of Lipscomb and the Learning Collaborative Inc. (LCI).

Lipscomb is the only university in the state currently giving out new Transition to Teaching scholarships. The university is recruiting new colleagues, as they are called in the master’s program, for the cohorts beginning in June and July, and officials hope to give out 80 scholarships to enrolled teachers over the course of the first year of the grant.

Lipscomb University has already enrolled 14 Transition to Teaching participants from the Metro Nashville Public School System and is currently recruiting in the eight other high-need school systems: Bells City School District, Bradford Special School District, Cocke County School System, Grundy County School District, Hamilton County School District, Haywood County School District, Jackson County School District and Manchester City School District.

The combination of a scholarship and a convenient master’s program is designed to attract more professionals into teaching, just as it did Bethy Irwin, an Antioch resident who dropped a non-edifying career in retail management to become an ELL (English as a Learned Language) teacher at Antioch Middle School after a life-changing mission trip to the Dominican Republic.

“My job before wasn’t very enriching. I wanted something more than that. So after working with the children in the Dominican, I decided that teaching at an underprivileged school was the perfect fit for me,” said Irwin.

But her undergraduate degree was not in education, much less ELL. So she began her first year of teaching fifth- through eighth-graders at Antioch through alternative licensure. Lipscomb’s MALT program appealed to her because she could get the preparation she needed for full licensure while also earning a master’s degree, a valuable asset, and working full-time, to gain experience, she said.

“I heard (MALT) was very flexible, and as a teacher you need a lot of flexibility” she said. “The first time we met, our cohort, which is all foreign language teachers, choose convenient times of day to meet and were asked to express all our concerns and particular topics of interest. Over the months the coordinators have brought in speakers to address those topics. It’s really crafted for us.”

According to Keith Brewer, executive director for the MALT and MASE programs, the two master’s degrees have several characteristics attractive to alternative license teachers and non-education professionals. Participants are able to teach full-time while attending classes approximately one weekend per month, they can complete the program in 14 months, and they receive three types of in-class mentoring throughout the program, he said.

Participants like the service-focused approach of the curriculum and the cost savings can’t hurt either, he said. Not only are the $5,000 Transition to Teaching scholarships available, but Lipscomb University is offering a 26 percent tuition discount for teachers working full-time, resulting in almost $11,000 in available financial assistance.

“Our hope is to contribute 400 highly qualified and master’s level teachers to Tennessee’s school systems in the next five years,” said Brewer. “To make that happen, busy teachers working full-time must have a convenient, cost-effective option to continue their education. We are so proud that the state and the federal government have recognized that Lipscomb’s programs provide a quality opportunity for teachers to do that.”

Lipscomb-LCI and the Tennessee Department of Education partnered to write the grant request to the federal government in 2006.

“The Transition to Teaching program is an excellent path for many mid-career professionals to become quality teachers in Tennessee,” Tennessee State Assistant Commissioner of Education Susan Bunch said. “This program fills an important need in our community to educate more qualified candidates.”

Due to a shortage of teachers in certain content areas, many Tennessee school systems are forced to hire teachers licensed in one content area, like social studies, and require them to teach in a different content area, like math. These teachers would not be considered “highly qualified” in the content they are teaching and that would downgrade the status of the school system under the federal No Child Left Behind program.

The Transition to Teaching grant is designed to encourage these teachers to go back to school and become “highly qualified” in the content area they are currently teaching in. It does so by funding the $5,000 scholarships to MALT and MASE, licensure requirement programs specifically designed to appeal to working teachers.

 

If you would like more information about the Transition to Teaching scholarship or the MALT and MASE programs, contact Katie Reel at 615.966.7157.

Lipscomb University also offers a Masters of Education with concentrations in instructional leadership and school administration and supervision. The department of education is also making plans to offer its education master's program in a completely on-line format.

If you would like more information on the Masters of education program, contact Dr. Junior High at 615.966.6067 or log on to http://graduateducation.lipscomb.edu.