Student teachers set for stipend program to launch

Applications for program will be available April 11

Grace Bettwy plans to keep her laptop close at hand on April 10. She’s hoping she will be one of the lucky education majors to win what amounts to a jackpot for student teachers hoping to launch their careers in Pennsylvania this fall.

Applications for a new student teacher stipend program will be available to download by April 11, according to the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, which is tasked with administering the program. Stipends will be awarded on a firstcome, first-served basis.

Bettwy, a Slippery Rock University English/language arts education major, plans to check that site a day early, in the hope of turning an unpaid 16-week student teaching position into less of a financial struggle.

“I’m really excited about the opportunity to get it,” she said. “I’m going to apply the second I see it.”

What makes it nerve-wracking for Bettwy and other aspiring teachers is knowing the program’s initial $10 million in funding will likely be insufficient to meet the demand for the $10,000 stipends. The stipends grow to $15,000 if student teachers are placed in a high-need public or non-public school with difficulty filling educator vacancies.

If fully funded, the program would eliminate unpaid student teaching.

A portion of the funding will be set aside to pay $2,000 stipends to teachers who work with the student teachers, as is required by the law that created the program. Students who receive a stipend are required to work in the commonwealth for three years after graduation.

Maggie Keithley, PHEAA’s vice president of program development, management and operations, anticipates the program will fund 600 to 700 student teachers. That’s only about 10% of an estimated pool of 6,500 to 7,000 education majors the state Department of Education expects to be doing their student teaching either in the fall or in the spring semester of 2025.

Despite the odds, Keithley encourages eligible education majors to apply.

“Submit an application regardless of whether you think we have the funding or not,” she said. “The more interest we have, the more voice these students have with their legislators to request more funding.”

After all, the strong interest in a one-time nursing loan forgiveness program helped to boost the funding from $5 million to $55 million, said Nathan Hench, PHEAA’s senior vice president for public affairs.

Gov. Josh Shapiro is anticipating stipend demand will surpass available funding. He is asking the General Assembly to increase funding to $15 million in his 2024-25 budget proposal to help address the state’s teacher shortage.

“That’s why my budget proposes additional investments in student teachers and talent recruitment so we can expose more young people to the joys of teaching and nurturing our kids,” he said in his budget address.

The Pennsylvania State Education Association is among those that support the additional funding. It projects $62.5 million would be needed if the state were to pay a stipend to all student teachers in 2024-25, said its spokesman Chris Lilienthal.

Officials at Pennsylvania’s 100 teacher preparation programs feel the same way, said James Preston, Slippery Rock’s director of student teaching and president-elect of the Pennsylvania Association of Colleges and Teacher Educators.

“We could have two student teachers in the same building and one student teacher is getting a $10,000 stipend and the other student teacher is getting nothing because they didn’t get to apply quickly enough. In that sense, it’s very inequitable,” Preston said.

For students, particularly adult students or career changers who have a family to support or mortgage to pay, he said a stipend could mean the difference between completing their student teaching semester, which is a requirement to earn a teaching certificate

in Pennsylvania, or not.

“I tell students I can’t make you not work but if you’re not performing in the classroom, I can end your student teaching semester,” he said. “Oftentimes, they do try to cut down on their work hours or put a pause in what they are doing to get through the semester and get that passing grade in student teaching.”

Pennsylvania joins a handful of states who in the last couple of years began offering student teacher stipends as an incentive to draw more people to the teaching profession. But it’s too early to know if it is making a dent in the nationwide need for more teachers.

In 2022, about 5,000 new teaching certificates were issued in Pennsylvania compared to more than 17,000 in 2011, according to a report from the Pennsylvania Department of Education. At the same time, the state is experiencing

record-high numbers of teachers leaving the profession, according to data from Penn State’s Center for Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Preston is optimistic the stipend program will begin to help with Pennsylvania’s educator shortage.

He said there is the threeyear teaching service requirement and high school students who want to go into teaching might say “not only can I do something I love but then that final semester I can get that $10,000 or $15,000 stipend. Maybe a parent who would discourage them from going into education might say, ‘Yes. That’s great. Go for it.’”

When the applications become available next week, Keithley said students are encouraged to complete the downloaded form legibly and upload it to their access account if they received or applied for a state grant or emailing it to the address that PHEAA

provides.

PHEAA will then work with each applicant’s college to validate that the student meets the eligibility requirements of having their criminal history and child abuse clearances and a 3.0 grade-point average. The school where the student teaching will take place also has to submit an application as a show of their commitment to fulfill obligations that the program puts on them.

After working out those details, stipends will be awarded until funding runs out. Bettwy said she is hoping her application is in the system before that happens.

“I know there’s not enough money and I would really obviously like to get a stipend,” Bettwy said. “Not knowing who’s all going to apply first and if I’ll make it on time, that definitely makes me nervous.”

Jan Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@pennlive.com. Follow her on X at @JanMurphy.