An ambitious $2.2 million project designed to help rookie educators survive their first year in the District of Columbia’s schools was severely undermined because officials didn’t disburse the funds and didn’t tell many school principals it was available for new teachers.
The New Teacher Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, offered to set up a mentoring program for hundreds of new teachers entering the D.C. schools, center Executive Director Ellen Moir said. In 2005, the center received a $750,000 grant from the Wachovia Foundation, and the D.C. schools committed another $1.5 million, school spokeswoman Mafara Hobson said.
But months into the program, top D.C. school officials still hadn’t written job descriptions, Moir said.
In the second year of the program, D.C. didn’t put any of its own money into it, Hobson said. D.C. officials also didn’t bother to tell all of its school principals that the program existed. As a result, only 16 mentors were recruited. The goal was to have 45 mentors in place to accommodate some 250 new teachers every year, Hobson said.
The few mentors who did brave the red tape were quickly overwhelmed.
“It was difficult,” Moir said in a phone interview Tuesday. “New teachers get the toughest assignments in the toughest districts with little support. We wanted to help them out.”
The Wachovia grant will expire at the end of the 2007-08 school year, and it’s too late to add new mentors, Moir said.
Young teachers, who are vital to reforming a school system, leave the D.C. schools in droves, new schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has said. Worse, they tell others about their experiences and make it harder to recruit top-flight staff.
Systemwide, about 6 percent of D.C. schools’ jobs were vacant last year, according to internal reviews.
Moir said she still thinks the mentoring program can make a difference and she said that Rhee — a former director of a nonprofit group that recruited new teachers for poor school districts — has thrown her full support behind it for its last year.
“We may not get all the pieces in place,” Moir said, “but we’re confident that the mentors we do have will be the best.”
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