Ron DeSantis Announces Initiatives to Recruit Teachers in Florida

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Tuesday announced a series of initiatives his administration will prioritize in the next legislative session which are designed to recruit more teachers in the Sunshine State, including specific efforts to help hometown heroes become educators.

“…making sure that people, students have an understanding of what it means to be an American. Understanding where our rights come from. Understanding how the Constitution is structured. Understanding how all those ideas have been important in various periods of American history, from the American revolution, through the Civil War, World War 2, Civil rights movement, through the Cold War,” DeSantis explained before detailing upcoming initiatives to recruit teachers.

“We are proposing, first, a Governor’s recruitment program focusing on our heroes,” he said.

“In addition to recruiting retired military veterans, we also want to include first responders, law enforcement EMTs, paramedics, [and] firefighters who have their bachelor’s degree to become teachers and bring their leadership and wisdom into the classroom,” he said, noting that they will “waive the exam fees,” with bonuses available for those signing up under the program.

We believe that the folks that have served our communities have an awful lot to offer and we’ve got people that have served 20 years in law enforcement, they retire and some of them are looking for kind of the next chapter in their life. Same with the military, got people that join when they’re 18 and they’re retired with 20 years before they’re 40 years old. Well, they’re not gonna just sit around on their hands, they want to do something, so we want to provide a pathway.

DeSantis described the second proposal as a teacher apprenticeship program.

“I believe that the teachers that become great teachers don’t become great teachers because they’re sitting in some university lecture hall, listening to some professor bloviate,” he explained:

I don’t think that’s what makes a teacher great. I think what makes a teacher great is actually being there, doing it, watching experienced teachers and seeing what they do that works–working directly with students–and it’s something that, that you acquire skills as you’re doing it. So we believe apprenticeships are a huge part of that. So we are going to have a teacher apprenticeship program that will allow Floridians with their associates degree to get professional experience teaching in the classroom under the mentorship of an experienced teacher. So they will spend two years teaching under the leadership of a high quality teacher mentor to gain real world classroom experience. The apprentice will then go on to receive the bachelor’s degree and the teacher mentor, for every apprentice that they have, the mentor will get a $4,000 bonus.

The third recruitment proposal is a scholarship program, which DeSantis said will “help current high school teachers earn their master’s degree, which will allow them to teach dual enrollment courses at the high school where they currently work.”

Tuesday’s announcement follows the governor detailing an initiative to assist veterans in becoming teachers in the Sunshine State, explaining that it is fitting to have those “who took an oath and put his or her life on the line to preserve, protect, and defend our flag and the freedom it represents” to teach the next generation.