Mesa Battles Teacher Shortage

In an unprecedented effort, San Diego Mesa College will soon administer a consortium of universities, community colleges and K-12 schools to combat the local, state and national teacher shortages.

A staggering 260,000 additional teachers will be needed in California by 2005, according to the state Department of Education. In San Diego County, an estimated 13,000 new teachers will be needed over the next five years.

This spring, Mesa College was awarded a $350,000 state grant to establish a Teacher and Reading Development Partnership (TRDP), beginning July 1.

Mesa was among 33 recipients of this grant statewide and the only winner in San Diego.

The college will supervise a collaboration of the colleges of education at San Diego State University (SDSU) and California State University at San Marcos (CSUSM), and the San Diego Unified School District.

The project seeks to motivate more community college students to pursue careers in teaching, to improve reading skills of elementary school students and to provide San Diego City Schools with a richly diverse and committed corps of new teachers for the near future.

Under Mesa College’s leadership, the schools and colleges will:

• Recruit a diverse population of promising students;
  
• Provide students with introductory and positive career exploration experiences through supervised field work placement; and
  
• Support curriculum development.
  
  

The consortium will develop a teacher preparation core curriculum that includes career exploration, cultural literacy and literacy teaching skills.

Collaborative curriculum development efforts and articulation agreements will provide aspiring students a seamless foundation of academic and financial support services, help participants transfer to local CSU teacher preparation programs and enable them to become credentialed teachers.

Next fall semester, Mesa students will be placed as supervised reading tutors in four San Diego Unified School District elementary schools: Kit Carson, Chesterton, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Each tutor will also be assigned a mentor teacher from one of the consortium institutions.

The teacher education partnership has its roots in a joint venture begun three years ago when Mesa College faculty and administrators approached CSUSM faculty and administrators. Together, they quickly developed teacher education preparation curriculum to be taught at Mesa along with a transfer agreement. The community college began to offer these courses in the summer of 1998.