As children were in the final days of their summer break in 2023, Knox County Schools was figuring out how it would welcome back students with around 150 open teaching positions and even more vacancies across various levels of the school system.
How that figure dropped to dozens in one year’s time was not by chance. It happened, in part, through a concerted effort by the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to address teacher vacancies across the state. With both the university and Knox County Schools based in town, the initiative has paid dividends on a very local level.
The dramatic drop in teacher vacancies is impressive, but KCS is aiming for zero. Alex Moseman, the executive director of human resources talent acquisition at KCS, is “firmly rooted” in that mission.
“Zero is always the goal,” he told Knox News.
Lauryn Zahn, a comprehensive development teacher at Gibbs High School, is a product of this pipeline. Though Knoxville is more than 2,100 miles away from her home in Southern California, where she tutored peers in high school, Zahn got word of someone who earned a scholarship to UT and learned of the university’s special education program.
It started to seem like UT’s program was following her, popping up over and over again in her college searches. She took it as a calling to become a teacher and took a chance on UT, where she returned after graduation to earn her master’s degree.
During her studies, Zahn joined the Grow Your Own pipeline, a first-of-its-kind program started by the state in 2020 to better connect school districts and universities.
Applicants accepted into the free program − both grad students and those who obtained their bachelor’s but need a teaching license − are placed into K-12 schools across the state. They are provided with online learning and apprenticeships to earn what they need to teach.
As part of the program, Zahn began working Monday through Thursday as a teacher’s assistant at Fulton High School. She taught virtually in both comprehensive development and inclusion classrooms and said she “was very blessed” to earn real-world experience, like writing individualized education plans to outline the support and services a student with a learning disability needs.
Her desire to teach was reinforced, and that’s part of the program’s mission. It’s what led her to Gibbs after earning her master’s degree in 2022, thereby fulfilling the UT-KCS pipeline.
“The fact that KCS bridged that gap was very important to me,” Zahn told Knox News.
University of Tennessee offers multiple paths to Knox County Schools
Over the past three years, UT has graduated 228 teachers who are now working at KCS. But the Grow Your Own program isn’t the only way UT grads can end up teaching in Knox County.
These four programs are the primary paths:
- An undergraduate program that leads to a license.
- An accelerated master of science program that culminates in a license.
- An alternative licensure program, known as the job-embedded practitioner, in which those who have a bachelor’s degree can work at a school and get paid while doing so, ultimately earning a license.
- A competency-based, licensure-only program called UT-PLAYS, which stands for Personalized Learning At Your Speed. This program leads to special education and math licenses.
The various programs bring together the two entities – UT and KCS – “to offer programs that meet the needs of anyone, anywhere and at any stage of life, who wants to become a teacher,” said David Cihak, director of UT’s Bailey Graduate School of Education and the associate dean of professional educator licensure.
“Our teacher preparation pipeline is designed to adapt to each individual’s unique circumstances, making it easier for everyone to achieve their goal of becoming a teacher,” he said.
While hiring teachers continues to be a challenge across the country, UT is exceeding expectations, according to data from the Tennessee Teacher Preparation Report Card. The university has produced 548 teachers in three years, while the UT System has produced 1,711 teachers.
UT Martin leads its system peers, graduating 717 teachers over the past three years.
This year, KCS is hosting 31 undergraduate interns, 67 graduate interns and 23 student teachers through UT’s programs. KCS also hires students from traditional programs, Cihak told Knox News, as these focus on clinical placements in schools (similar to how aspiring nurses are placed in hospitals) to prepare the next generation of teachers.
Nearly 200 UT students are working toward early clinical placements in KCS.
“I think that it’s been really sweet to see the partnership that UT and KCS has brought together,” Zahn said. “I think more people and universities should try to kind of do that in an aspect. Like, working hands on or hand-in-hand with each other because I think through those relationships − they do get a lot of really great teachers and people who want to stay because of things that they’ve heard from others.”
Students can become apprentices in the undergraduate program, and UT offers licensure opportunities in various education fields from agriculture to special education to elementary music.
“Parents every day turn over their kid for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, 200 days a year and entrust us, and that’s just an awesome responsibility,” Cihak said. “It’s such a rewarding responsibility.”
Of the four main pathways, the undergraduate path is one of the newest additions to this pipeline, while the graduate student path is the primary option.
“Last spring, we graduated our first set of undergraduates out of the undergraduate program,” said Ellen McIntyre, dean of the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences. “They did their four years, and so we’ve got a real pipeline there.”
Breaking barriers to teaching in Tennessee: ‘We got a pathway for you’
While the local benefits hit home in Knox County, some of the online pathways like Grow Your Own and UT-PLAYS are available across the state. UT works with 118 school districts, including neighboring Anderson County Schools, Blount County Schools and Sevier County Schools.
UT will take its commitment a step forward when it spends $100,000 on a study to ensure these teacher pathways are producing quality educators.
A large corporation can shoulder a 1-5% staff vacancy, Cihak said, but 1-5% makes a huge difference in a school system.
To increase accessibility to teacher prep programs, Cihak is working to lower barriers to entering them, like only requiring a primary transcript to join a pathway.
“If you want to become a teacher, we got a pathway for you,” he said.
It doesn’t matter the circumstance, he said, pointing to two career shifters in Memphis who excelled in teaching while in the program but needed flexibility and support from the university to complete it.
“They work second jobs, they have full families, but we never gave up. They never gave up,” Cihak said. “Their perseverance was there. And if they kept on coming, we were going to make sure that they graduated.”
And so they did in December.
Balancing flexibility, empathy and academic rigor is a key element for McIntyre within the “modern educational sphere.” By maintaining its standards and accommodating everyone in the classroom, UT is able to instill into future educators those same values, which they can apply in their own classrooms with their own students.
Culture attracts talent, talent builds culture, pipeline does both
After graduating and completing Tennessee’s license programs, new teachers land all over the state in full-time positions at schools that need them filled, thanks in large part to some of these efforts.
It just so happened Zahn was already at home in Knoxville, where she now teaches − in her own pedagogy style − a new generation of learners at Gibbs who could one day become educators, themselves.
As she pays it forward, former professors who helped Zahn forge her path check in from time to time. Zahn has updated UT on her work, which she said can be demanding at times, as “there’s a lot more to the job than people realize.”
For districts to attract and retain talent, teachers are looking for places that provide more training opportunities, continuing education, meaningful connections among peers and high-quality work environments, Zahn told Knox News.
Of course, a good-paying salary is a plus. This past year, Knox County Schools upped the salary for teachers by an average of 10%. Principals and assistant principals received a 3% raise on average.
The hikes from KCS, a $39 million “strategic investment in people,” was done to ensure all district employees are paid on par with their peers in other counties.
“If you feel supported in (your district), your people will stay, and your people will want to be there and want to help,” Zahn said.
Zahn hopes to stay at Gibbs for the foreseeable future. The dream is to open her own post-secondary program for people with intellectual disabilities. But to get there, she had to get to this point in what’s a fresh career − something she credits, in large part, to the pipeline established between the University of Tennessee and Knox County Schools.
“Education is evolving and changing so much, and you have to kind of grow with it,” Zahn said. “If you decide not to grow and become stagnant, then it’s not going to become as effective.
“I think having the people who are willing to grow with the kids and make sure that we’re making the connections is really important, and I think that kind of goes hand-in-hand with the demand as well.”
Keenan Thomas is a higher education reporter. Email keenan.thomas@knoxnews.com. X, formerly known as Twitter @specialk2real.
Areena Arora, data and investigative reporter for Knox News, can be reached by email at areena.arora@knoxnews.com. Follow her on X @AreenaArora and on Instagram @areena_news.
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