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A high school student in the P-Teach program works with a student.

Thanks to a $2 million ESSER grant, St. Vrain Valley School District is expanding its P-Teach program that helps high schoolers get started on teaching careers in four rural school districts. 

St. Vrain’s program started in 2019 and now has 150 high school students enrolled, enabling them to earn University of Colorado Denver credits. The expansion provides the program in Montezuma-Cortez RE-1, Las Animas, Cheraw 31 and Estes Park school districts.

“Why is there a teacher shortage?” asked Diane Lauer, St. Vrain’s chief academic officer. “We cannot point our fingers at the universities and say, ‘You're not doing your job.’ We're not doing our job. If we don't have a career pathway for teachers in our high schools, of course, we're not turning out teachers.”

The Expanded Learning Opportunity grant funded the teaching program and a summer Reading ReLaunch with students being hired as teaching apprentices at $12.56 an hour.

P-Teach was designed on the successful P-TECH model, which gives high school students a head start and an associate degree in areas like computer sciences. There were, however, some important tweaks, Lauer said.

“We knew that an associate's degree would not get you anything in the way of a teaching job because you typically need a bachelor's degree,” she said. “So instead of partnering with a two-year institution, we partnered with a four-year university because we wanted to have that alignment.”

Additionally, education credits can’t be transferred to other college subject areas, unlike in P-Tech. 

Lauer said the district is “cautious about recruiting kids at ninth grade directly to go into the teacher pathway.” Instead, the district started with juniors and seniors. “And most of our students are now graduating with anywhere between 12 credits, or 14.” The credits are divided between the two upper-class years. 

The first group of high school students started P-Teach in the spring of 2019. Six of those graduates have been hired back by the district, five of them as teachers, Curton said.

The rural schools started with 15 students in their P-Teach, with a goal of reaching 60. St. Vrain is looking into being able to offer some of its courses to other districts over Zoom.

Since the program began in 2022, Estes Park has committed to developing a teacher career pathway modeled on the St. Vrain program and other districts, such as Adams 12. 

 “We’re on a mission to fix this teacher shortage, and it has to happen one district at a time,” Lauer said.