Educators increasingly rely on crowdsourcing to fill gaps in basic education funding, from classroom supplies to textbooks. With federal education grants in the crosshairs, at least one community is leaning into the strategy to pay for teacher preparation, too.
Winston-Salem TEACH, a collaborative teacher residency led by three North Carolina colleges and the Winston-Salem/Forsyth school district, lost 80% of its funding last February after the U.S. Education Department abruptly canceled virtually all grants from two of its largest discretionary programs for teacher training—including $4.7 million of WS-TEACH’s five-year award under the Teacher Quality Partnership Program.
“It was a devastating blow,” said Kate Allman, WS-TEACH’s executive director.
That grant directly supported stipends for the program’s residents, who get the equivalent of a first-year Winston-Salem/Forsyth teaching salary for 12 months while they earn an accelerated master’s degree in elementary, secondary, or special education.
After earning a degree and completing licensure requirements, the new teachers also get two years of coaching in exchange for committing to teach in one of the district’s high-need schools for at least three years.
In a Facebook post, Allman asked for local help to make up the difference after initiative’s grant ended prematurely. Within a month, a citywide campaign raised $800,000 to continue the residency, which had been in year three of a five-year grant. The groundswell of local support—which included pledges from six community groups and individual donations ranging from $10 to $1,000—also led to $400,000 in additional support from local foundations later last spring.
The donations allowed the group to continue supporting 14 active residents, and by May, the group was able to announce a new cohort of nine new teachers.
“It was just amazing,” Allman said. “That just really speaks to how our community values the importance of putting in excellent teachers, particularly in our high-needs schools.”
The district’s residency, like others, covers the cost of student-teaching, something many aspiring teachers don’t receive—and a factor that can be a make-or-break factor in whether they stay on.
Although the feds have never been a major funder of teacher-preparation programs—state universities prepare the bulk of U.S. teachers—federal funding has helped to seed examples of residencies and other programs in which teachers get more support when entering the profession, making it more likely they’ll commit for the long term.
Residencies tend to be both more comprehensive and significantly more expensive than other community-based teacher-preparation programs. As federal support for residencies becomes less certain and states tighten their fiscal belts, more communities may be asked to pass the hat to maintain a high-quality pool of new teachers.
Keeping teacher pipeline open
Ryan Harris, a math teacher at the district’s Thomas Jefferson Middle School, said the residency rescued his teaching career.
Harris started in Winston-Salem schools with Teach For America in 2019. Like 70% of new teachers in the state, he started working under a provisional teaching license, but pandemic disruptions left him with little support to complete his certification requirements while teaching.
“Long-term sub pay was just not enough; I started to get into more debt, and I told myself that there was no way for me to move forward ... because I couldn’t sustain,” Harris said. “Being in a program that provided that stipend and let me focus on my studies was huge. It’s honestly the only way that I was going to be able to continue in education.”
As a teacher-resident, Harris earned a master’s degree in education and completed licensure requirements with an additional middle-grades credential. He said the program allowed him to make a livable salary and saved him about $20,000 in tuition costs for his degree. He said the residency also taught him more about the history and background of Winston-Salem and its students, which has given him more insight into their instructional needs.
All the WS-TEACH residents who have completed the program since it started in 2022 are still teaching in Winston-Salem’s low-income schools. Harris said he plans to stay at Thomas Jefferson for the foreseeable future, and is interested in training to be an administrator.
Federal teacher-preparation funding unlikely to be restored
At the time of the cuts, an Education Department spokesperson said the $70 million-a-year Teacher Quality Partnerships program and the $80 million-a-year Supporting Effective Educator Development, or SEED, grants were eliminated for promoting “divisive ideologies.”
In the latest development in a lawsuit filed by eight states seeking to restore the grants, a federal judge said she could not restore the grant funding, but promised to rule on whether the administration’s move to cancel the grants was lawful. (North Carolina was not one of the states.)
Allman said she was never given detailed reasons of why WS-TEACH’s grant was canceled.
Teacher-candidates in the program receive training in social-emotional learning and culturally relevant teaching practices, as well as research-based best practices for teaching and using student achievement data, according to the grant proposal. In canceling competitive education grants under a number of programs, the Trump administration more recently has cited language about culturally relevant instruction and diversity- and equity-related priorities as reasons for terminating grant-funded work early.
Harris said the Winston-Salem program also gave new educators practical support in classroom management, self-care, and financial planning as a teacher.
Allman is working with Winston-Salem State and Wake Forest universities and Salem College to make WS-Teach sustainable without relying on federal funding.
