New York’s Frontier Central school district, on the banks of Lake Erie south of Buffalo, faces an increasingly common staffing problem: As of August this year, 140 out of its 478 teachers have been with district four years or less—and the ranks of untenured teachers are expected to swell to 250 in the next five years.
And while Frontier provides mentors to first-year teachers, its leaders worry that the majority of Frontier teachers will be new and untenured, with less institutional memory and limited engagement in the district’s culture and community.
“That’s approximately half our teaching staff,” said Patrick Moses, Frontier’s assistant superintendent for human resources. “They need support not just in year one, but also in years two, three, and four. ... How do we set ourselves up to provide the very best instructional environment that we can?”
To address the issue, the 4,400-student Frontier district has launched a training and support program for new and untenured teachers—affectionately dubbed the “NUTs"—in the years between the milestones of new-teacher induction and tenure four years. (In New York, it takes teachers four years and a day to earn tenure, which confers due process protections before they can be let go.)
Most teacher support stops after a year or two
The Education Commission of the States, a clearinghouse of state policies, finds that about 31 states and the District of Columbia require induction and mentoring for new teachers, but in many cases these programs do not extend beyond the first year.
Frontier teachers enjoy one-to-one mentoring in their first year. The NUTs program is less intensive than that, but provides ongoing support from veteran teachers afterward and helps early career educators build a professional and social network to ask for help, share ideas, and learn about the district.
Building off the district’s existing mentoring program for first-year teachers, a veteran mentor teacher in the district, Amber Chandler, launched a pilot of the extended support program in Frontier Middle School in 2023, with help from a $10,000 professional development grant from the American Federation of Teachers. The district has opted to expand the program to all its untenured teachers in the 2025-26 school year.
“You can look at this as, ‘The sky is falling! We have all these new teachers! What are we gonna do?’” said Chandler, the author of the 2023 book Everything New Teachers Need to Know But Are Afraid to Ask. “But there’s a great opportunity to create a community of educators from the ground up.”
This kind of extended support and acculturation has become increasingly important with the so-called “greening” of teaching experience nationwide, as retirements escalate and fewer young teachers stay in the profession long term.
“It’s a phenomenon that we see across the landscape,” said Danielle Brown, the director of candidate experience and an expert on early-career educators for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which runs the National Board Certification process.
Board certification is an advanced teaching credential requiring a content assessment and portfolios of work. Traditionally, only teachers who have completed their third year in the classroom are eligible for the certification, but the National Board recently allowed teachers to begin the process as early as their first year.
“That change was in response to where we can see the landscape of where teaching is going,” Brown said. “A mid-career teacher may be someone who is in year four or five, right? And once upon a time, a mid-career teacher was closer to 10 to 15 years in the profession.”
These teachers still need support and development from their districts, Brown said, but their needs differ from those typically addressed by basic induction programs.
“Once you’re in that mid-career space, you’re thinking, OK, I have pedagogy now. What does this look like in practice with my actual students?,” Brown said. “That mid-career educator is really looking for opportunities to build community through learning. They’re looking for a space of reflection and collaboration ... seeing ways that connections could be made across either content areas or with other educators.”
Lengthier support for teachers can be cost effective
Chandler said most of the new supports cost little but build significant instructional and social capital for teachers. Teachers in the program have monthly online “coffee breaks” in which they can discuss basic common problems, like grading or communicating with families. Teachers can get explicit help for classroom observations and preparing their professional portfolios for tenure review, but NUTs provides most of its information through social events: trivia nights, happy hours, and Q&A sessions rather than formal meetings and training.
“It was never like, ‘come to a class and sit through like a boring seminar,’” said Madeline Vail, a newly tenured 2nd grade teacher who participated in the NUTs pilot program at Frontier Middle School last year. “My [first-year] mentor wasn’t at the same school as me anymore, so it was nice that we were constantly having these events ... not only to build community with the other new and untenured teachers, but veteran teachers were there as well to discuss any issues.”
They use a group messaging app to coordinate rather than email, to allow teachers to post photos, take polls, and ask quick questions of their colleagues without digging through other official communications.
“That way they will build community and become committed together,” Chandler said. “Teaching’s lonely, but if they find their community, it’ll really strengthen education.”
It can also help in a crisis. “In my third year of teaching, I had a student pass away, and it was so nice to have support and mentorship through that,” Vail said. Despite no longer being a newbie, “I still felt like I had mentors who were available to me and people who were supporting me.”
Not all teachers who are new to the district are new to teaching, and the program has also given more experienced, untenured teachers a way to engage with the community.
Lindsey Wright, a kindergarten teacher and military spouse with 18 years’ experience across different districts, is going into her final pre-tenure year at Frontier.
Though she has extensive pedagogical experience, getting used to the different culture in each district is stressful even for seasoned teachers.
“When you go to a new district, there’s different policies, different procedures. ... It can be overwhelming and taxing even for veteran teachers,” Wright said. Through the program, “you have somebody help bring you into the fold and envelop you into your school environment. You don’t feel so alone and like you’re floundering.”
Wright has already started to take classes to become a mentor herself once she makes tenure next year.
“Teaching is hard and it’s complex and there’s always challenges,” she said, “so it helps having a safe person to lean on as you’re trying to figure out being in a new district, in a new school with new colleagues.”
