As school districts across the nation continue to struggle with teacher recruitment, many local school districts are finding creative ways to encourage new hires.
Earlier this year, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) unveiled a Teacher Recruitment and Retention Playbook. This playbook outlines ways the state hopes to improve the teaching profession through cornerstones such as statewide campaigns, targeted funding, and strategic use of tools.
The playbook also showed statistics that prove a career in education is losing interest among college freshmen. Dr. Reesha Adamson, Associate Dean at Missouri State University's (MSU) College of Education, said she has seen this in her work.
"The number of students pursuing education degrees has declined nationally and at MSU, reflecting broader concerns about the teaching profession, including low salaries, high workloads, and financial barriers to higher education," Adamson said. "This decline has exacerbated teacher shortages and increased the urgency to address these challenges creatively and equitably."
Data presented at the January State Board of Education Meeting showed there were 12,924 people enrolled in Missouri education preparation programs in the 2023-24 school year. That is a decrease of nearly 700 from the 2022-23 school year, but up 28% compared to five years ago.
Data also showed a 1.5% decrease in the number of people receiving teaching certificates in 2023-24.
Office of Educator Quality Assistant Commissioner Paul Katnik said these numbers are promising and indicate an increasing supply of new teachers coming into the workforce.
"Addressing the teacher shortage problem here in Missouri, if you'll imagine, is an immense task, just like changing the direction of a ship at sea," Katnik said in the meeting. "It's slow, it's deliberate, and it happens through incremental changes."
As the playbook lays out ways the state hopes to improve teacher recruitment, some school districts are taking matters into their own hands to incentivize the career path to current high school and college students.
Bolivar R-1 Schools in the southwest part of the state is taking it up a notch and paying high school seniors for their work in the classroom as teachers' aides.
Bolivar's BoMo Works program allows high school students to get paid for working internships or apprenticeships in various career paths, including the automotive, hospitality, and health fields. For the last three years, the district has been offering an apprenticeship in education, too.
The teacher's aide apprenticeship allows seniors at Bolivar High School to work alongside a Bolivar classroom teacher for multiple hours a week. MSTA member and Director of Career Education Pathways Ashley Clift said the school district then pays the student for their work at the base para rate.
"The apprenticeship experience that they're getting, this is not the same as like an A+ tutor or a teacher's aide, per se," Clift said. "We want them working in small groups, working one-on-one with kids, doing things that a pre-service teacher would do to prepare them to take over the classroom someday."
Clift said Bolivar has an agreement with the Department of Labor to offer these real-world opportunities for students. The various jobs, including teaching, include curriculum that is aligned to fit the Department of Labor's standards for that job.
For example, the teaching apprenticeship, as outlined in the Department of Labor agreement, shows the apprentice will perform tasks such as supervising students, grading student work, and preparing lesson materials for on-the-job learning. Both the district and the student must sign an agreement saying they will complete a certain amount of coursework.
BoMo Works requires students to be in good academic standing and complete pre-requisite courses before participating in an active internship or apprenticeship. For the teacher's aide position, Clift said students must take a Careers in Teaching Pathways course (which is also a dual credit course through MSU) and a practicum.
From there, interested students interview with the district's assistant superintendent. The assistant superintendent then contacts the principal of the building the student wants to work at, and that principal works to find an area of high need where a teacher's aide would be most useful. The student is then hired on by the district.
"It's just like a regular employee," Clift said. "We're going to use our funds and put you at a high needs area—maybe a class that has higher (special education) numbers or kids that are at higher risk or struggling and do tiered interventions. There's a lot taken into consideration there."
On top of students gaining experience, Clift said this apprenticeship also helps current Bolivar teachers who have the teacher's aide apprentice that semester.
"I think it's a real relief to some of those teachers," Clift said. "When you're working with 30 kids in a classroom and there's one of you and you have somebody who's knowledgeable and wants to be there to help, then [teachers] willingly take on that assistance."
Clift said BoMo Works hours are very flexible to students' schedules, ideally allowing them to work around an hour and a half each day.
Bolivar is able to pay its students through Missouri's $10,000 Grow Your Own grant money. Clift said about $9,000 is used to pay student apprenticeships, and starting this year, the remaining $1,000 in grant funds is being used to pay for graduates' substitute certifications.
She said the Department of Labor requires around 3,500 working hours, which can't be reached during the regular school year. So, many students continue working for the district, either through substitute teaching or the district's daycare program, after they graduate high school. Clift mentioned one student who is currently working full-time at the district's daycare while taking college courses online through MSU.
Clift hopes getting prospective teachers in the classroom now will help students decide if teaching is the path for them and eliminate burnout down the road.
"It's all well and good to take a class on classroom management and to get up and lecture to students about ways to do that, but [our students] have seen it in action, and some of them have even had to do it," Clift said. "So, by far, this experience is going to provide a great foundation going forward for their classes."
She said the teacher's aide apprenticeship has already seen major growth, with just two student apprentices in the program's first year, four this year, and nine who have already applied for the 2025-26 school year.