For University of Texas Permian Basin, the STREAM grant is related to expansion not only of the number of people they would like to recruit into teacher education but the variety of people brought into the college.
STREAM stands for Students’ Thoughtful Response to That extends to retaining them in college, providing support and helping them get jobs in the local schools, Dean of the College of Education Larry Daniel said.
The project’s overall five-year budget is $2,995,537.
UTPB is the largest Hispanic-serving institution within a 500-mile radius from El Paso to Dallas/Fort Worth.
The university serves a diverse student body of more than 4,100 undergraduate students per year, 32 percent are Hispanic and 77 percent are first-generation or low income.
STREAM addresses the region’s kindergarten through 12th grade teacher shortage by implementing evidence-based and high-impact strategies activities and services that will increase enrollment, persistence, completion and placement rates of Hispanic and low-income students in UTPB’s education preparation program, a news release said.
When everyone is hired, Daniel said they hope to start in November.
The grant is specifically targeting first-generation Hispanic males.
“We’re an institution that has designations as both Hispanic-serving and minority-serving. We value very much the variety of people that are in our community. We know that all of our students in our schools need, as much as possible, students who look like them. So getting more men to think about coming into teaching more people of color. We’re particularly reaching out to our rural communities. So sometimes we think about Midland and Odessa and we forget that there are many other vibrant communities. They may be small, but they’re very vibrant and they definitely need quality educators. We’re looking at expanding a lot of the good work we’ve done close to home out to some of our rural communities, so that we recruit the best people and that we prepare them in the best way possible to become excellent educators,” Daniel said.
He noted that UTPB got the funding from a very competitive federal grant about a year ago.
“We’ve been in a planning year and we’re still getting all of our staff on board. We have a fairly large support staff of about five to seven people. We’re getting all of those positions hired now and we’ll be making formal announcements about the services of the grant, probably within the next 30 days,” Daniel said Oct. 12.
He added that a piece of the grant is that they are enhancing significantly the focus on the use of technology. “We have a special component of the grant. In fact, we’re hiring an educational technology expert who will work with our students to be fully prepared to work with the most current learning technologies in the classroom. To put it in a nutshell, we want to recruit more. We want to help them be successful and stay in college and graduate and we want to give them the absolute best opportunity to be excellent educators when they complete their degrees,” Daniel said.
Daniel was involved in meetings to get more male teachers that look like the student body a few years ago. He said the STREAM grant ties in with that.
“… In fact, this grant pulls together quite a few things that we have been working on for several years. That initiative started the first or second year I was here. Our objective at that point was just to focus on the dearth of of males, especially in our elementary and middle grades programs. That effort got sort of put on hiatus when (the) pandemic came along. Everybody just got focused on survival and doing the … things we had to do to keep in business,” Daniel said.
UTPB is looking to draw students from outside the immediate Odessa-Midland area.
“… The other thing that we’re pulling into this is our teacher residency program. We’ve really perfected that teacher residency model with ECISD and MISD. We’ve begun to experiment out with a few of the smaller districts outside the immediate area, and we want to really expand that teacher residency program, ideally, so that all of our students will have the advantage of the year-long teacher residency,” he added.
During the last year and a few months, Daniel said UTPB has been getting better acquainted with people in the rural districts.
“We’ve gone out as far west as Van Horn. We’ve gone as far south as Presidio. We’ve gone as far east as Colorado City … (and) as far north as probably Lamesa. What we realized in making some decisions about how to grow our programs, we realized that a lot of the work we do is very close to home,” Daniel said. “ECISD and MISD will always be our anchor partners.”
“They’re bigger. They’re right here. We’ve worked with them for many years very successfully, and we’ve got a high degree of confidence with them. I would say they have a high degree of confidence with us. We’re reliable partners and all of that. The good thing is we’ve been able to perfect some very good practices working with those two anchor partners …,” he added.
Last summer, they had a day and a half summit with about 25 school districts where they explained UTPB’s teacher residency program.
“We identified what we saw as some of the needs of the more remote districts and we listened to them to gain even more information about what it meant to serve those communities,” Daniel said. “Subsequently, we’ve been going out to them and making visits. This year, we have year-long teacher residencies piloted with two of our remote districts — McCamey and Pecos-Barstow-Toyah; very much like the way we’re doing it here in ECISD and MISD. Those districts are there. They’re hiring and paying the person. In fact, they actually took people in both those districts that were already in paraprofessional roles. They were on the district payroll already, but they shifted their job to be in a teacher residency. We worked with them to identify district-based site coordinators to work with the students. Then we have a faculty member that is kind of overseeing the work to assure that they’re implementing the residency model with full fidelity, as we like to do it, whether it’s here locally, out in a more remote community or anywhere else for that matter.”
The best strategy they have for retaining teachers in education is preparing them extremely well, Daniel said.
“That is why we’re really promoting the year-long residency …”
He added that students who have come through the year-long residency program are much better prepared. First-year teachers are like second year teachers because they’ve already spent a year in the school.
“… We also, as we’re engaging in the partnerships for the year-long residencies, we are building extremely strong relationships with those districts. We’re getting to know the people who work there at a very deep level. I think those relationships helped not only sustain our partnership with them, but sustain the support that the teachers have once they accept those jobs,” he said.
“We’re still very tied into that district. Our faculty are out on those sites a good bit, so we maintain a long-term relationship with those graduates once they get out of the schools,” Daniel added.
Anytime they meet with a partner school, they ask if they’ve noticed anything in the graduates’ or current residents’ performance that we might need to strengthen a little bit.
“Those are questions that we ask regularly. If we hear something we will start acting upon it very quickly because we want to be the best that we can,” Daniel said.
They train teachers in most subjects, special education and grade levels.
“We can offer an undergraduate major in special education, so a person (can) be a special ed generalist. Also in our elementary program, we can do a supplemental certification in either bilingual, ESL (English as a second language) or special ed. So it’s added on to the elementary,” Daniel said.
“We’re hiring our case manager, our technology specialist, we’re hiring an outreach coordinator who’s going to really go out and start working with the districts. Once we get all of those positions, hired we’re going to start just blasting the campus with lots of messaging and hey, you want to be a teacher? Come see us,” Daniel said.
“ … We’re already to large degree really getting that message out, but we’re going to particularly start looking at the populations of interest …,” he added.
He said a lot of that will be reaching out to the rural communities.
“… It’s going to be an opportunity for us to look at trying to keep students in their programs of study. We do a fairly good job of retention here, but we can always do better,” Daniel said.
He noted that students at UTPB hate to borrow money, but hopefully they have alleviated some of that with the Falcon Free scholarship.
“But if students get to a place financially, where they’re struggling a little bit, sometimes they’ll just suddenly not be in school …,” Daniel said.
Along with finances, students may have family responsibilities; one of their children may be sick; or they’re helping an elderly family member.
“There are a lot of things in life that may draw them away,” he said.
A good portion of students are first-generation. They’re families want them to be successful, but they don’t know how to advise the student.
“This grant will offer those case management services, Our case manager is not just be sitting in an office waiting for students to come in and say I need some help. This person is going to be following the students around; not standing over their shoulder necessarily, but just checking in; seeing how they’re doing; if the grades are falling a little bit; if attendance is off in classes … they’re going to just be saying, hey, can we can we assist you? Let me direct you over here to the counseling center if they’ve got some life issues. We have a food pantry on campus here if you’re struggling financially right now and finding hard to get the groceries you need.”
UTPB has a Career Closet where students can get professional clothes.
“A lot of it is just helping them realize the resources we have. Our Academic Success Center is here in this building, but sometimes students are reluctant to go or they don’t know enough about it. The case manager will just be kind of saying, hey, you need some tutoring support. We’re going to help you,” Daniel said.
They also are hiring tutors, many of whom are graduates to help them prepare for the licensure exam.
“That is an obstacle for some of our students. They take the test more than once; they get very frustrated. At some point, they just say I don’t think I’m ever going to finish they want to throw their hands up, so we’re going to give very close tutoring to help them be successful in those exams. Who better to help than a student who took them maybe a year or so ago,” he added.
