Grow Your Own Scholarship Fund Helping to Grow a Future

Gatesville ISD has made a commitment to attract highquality candidates from within our school community to serve our students. Their new program, Grow Your Own, is a scholarship fund geared toward not only helping to attract up and coming teachers to the district, but also giving back to the community and helping their own home grown students return to their alma maters in a teaching capacity.

Rural schools account for 37 percent of school districts in Texas and the state has more rural schools than any other state in America. Not only is the state as a whole experiencing a teacher shortage, along with the rest of the nation, but those rural schools are typically less attractive to the mainstream, and therefore have a more difficult time attracting the masses making the chore a little more difficult for the recruitment of new teachers.

“Grow Your Own” is an approach that focuses on the recruitment and preparation of local students and adults who are likely to stay in or return to their local community to teach. This type of approach can help drum up interest in teaching among students before they graduate from high school, and it can support adults from the community that may be interested in teaching but do not currently have the credentials to enter the classroom.

Gatesville ISD partners with the Central Texas College Foundation, Temple College Foundation, and Texas A&M University-Central Texas (TAMUCT) to assist aspiring teachers by awarding scholarships to help cover the cost of tuition, fees, and textbooks. Candidates accepted into the program at the junior college level would receive a $500 loan per semester from GISD and an additional $500 scholarship from the junior college each semester for a total of $2,000 per year. Participants at the university level would receive a $1,000 loan per semester from GISD and an additional $1,000 scholar-

ship from the university each semester for a total of $4,000 per year. The district typically accepts two to three applicants a year depending on which college/university the recipient is applying for.

This mutually beneficial program not only helps the candidate but the district as well. The program participants will sign a contract for the loan committing to teach no less than five years for GISD upon receiving teacher certification. The awardee will be forgiven 20% of the loan for each year of service to the district. Those eligible to apply for the scholarship-loan program include GHS seniors, former GHS graduates, and current GISD employees such as paraprofessionals and substitutes.

Battling the current teacher shortage, many districts are looking for incentives to attract quality teachers to their districts. The district was noticing that hiring teachers was becoming more difficult each year. They had heard of other districts offering similar opportunities and patterned the Grow Your Own program after some of those others. The district also recognized the importance of recognizing outstanding students and staff that wanted to be educators.

Shane Webb, Assistant Superintendent of Academics, believes that this goes beyond simply attracting new quality teachers to the district. “This most definitely serves as a model for helping with teacher shortages, but most importantly it serves as a model to help aspiring teachers earn a college degree and follow their dreams of teaching while also easing the financial burden,” he stated.

One of the first recipients of this new program will begin in her classroom in August. Kayleigh Tennison graduated in May from Texas A&M – Central Texas. Kayleigh was an outstanding GHS graduate (ranked high in the 2018 graduating class). She kept an amazing GPA during her two years at Temple College and her two years at Texas A&M Central Texas.

Because GISD assisted with her tuition, she has agreed to come back and teach high school math for the next five years. During the most recent spring semester, Kayleigh was a long term substitute for a teacher on maternity leave. Before that she was a paraprofessional at the elementary school. Because of the program, Kayleigh will officially be the teacher of record in her own high school math classroom beginning this new school year.

If you would like more information about this program please contact Shane Webb, Assistant Superintendent, at Gatesville Independent School District at 254-865-7251.