A decade ago, Corrina González was a beloved preschool paraeducator in California’s Fresno Unified school district. She loved teaching and was great with kids, but tuition costs and time proved barriers to becoming a full K-12 teacher.
In another district, González might have left the profession. Here, she entered a complex pipeline of district programs intended to help her build a permanent career in education.
First came a residency with free tuition at Fresno State University and a $34,000 stipend to help support her during student teaching. That was followed by two years of coaching as a new teacher to ease her transition to the classroom.
Today, González spends her days helping her 3rd graders at Burroughs Elementary prepare for their first state assessments, and at night she takes classes at Fresno Pacific University as she works toward a master’s degree in literacy—also paid for by a partnership between the district and college.
She still meets regularly with instructional coach Elica Gutierrez to improve her practice and ease the stress of teaching a tested grade for the first time.
“It’s so good just sitting with Elica, where she’s hearing all my questions and my doubts and my concerns, breaking down [test] information, showing me how I can improve my kids’ growth,” González said. “It’s everything, so I don’t feel alone.”
Teacher shortages, driven in part by both rising costs to become a classroom educator and more veteran teachers retiring, make it increasingly necessary for districts to take a more hands-on approach to their future workforce. Districts nationwide have taken up an array of apprenticeships, residencies, and local grow-your-own training programs to expand the pipeline of teachers entering and committing to stay in the classroom.
But few districts take a more intensive approach to teacher development than Fresno. The 79,000-student district in Northern California has more than a dozen different programs to guide and prepare would-be teachers into the field.
Each targets one possible source of new talent—high school students interested in teaching, college students looking for a part-time job, student-teachers coming out of teacher prep, existing district support staff, or career-changers looking for an on-ramp. Once teachers enter the classroom, the pipeline programs create both intensive mentoring for early-career teachers and ongoing opportunities—like the literacy master’s program—for advancement in the field.
Fresno’s leaders say this seemingly complex teacher-pipeline system is a response to a broad and ongoing instability in the teaching workforce.
“There’s going to be a mass exodus from retirement in the next five years—every single year,” said Teresa Morales-Young, Fresno’s director of teacher development. “It’s funny, at some point you think this has got to stop, right? ... And I don’t think it’s going to stop. We have to get new teachers, and all those new teachers have to have support and induction.”
Major structural changes to the teacher pipeline are also reshaping how districts find and onboard new talent. Nationwide, fewer people opt to become teachers now than a decade ago, and more teachers who do enter the classroom come with less formal preparation, having entered through shorter alternative programs, many of them online. Lax licensing rules have been factor, too: During the pandemic, many states loosened up their teaching requirements, leading to an influx of uncertified teachers lacking classroom experience.
Such challenges can be found nationally, and like Fresno, many districts face the daunting task of building and supporting future teacher pipelines by themselves. They can no longer rely on local teacher colleges, hiring fairs, or job boards to supply enough preservice teachers with a strong grasp of the post-pandemic contours of the job.
“We need to reimagine the teacher pipeline,” said Diego Arambula, the vice president for education transformation at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
“We’re all seeing a huge reimagination of school,” Arambula said, but “when schools and systems are doing some of that rethinking ... they find themselves either growing their own [teachers] or investing deeply in early-stage retraining.”
While it can be expensive for districts to help pay for tuition or mentoring for aspiring and early-career educators, doing so can help schools find teachers who will fit their academic culture, according to Sami Smith, a talent recruiter for the Distinctive Schools Network, a group of charter schools in Chicago.
“Having teachers actually experiencing the work and getting feedback in real time with growth-focused coaching is the merit that comes with growing your own pipeline,” Smith said. “You can teach people how you want your students to be taught.”
An array of programs to attract and support teachers
Fresno, nestled halfway between San Francisco and the Yosemite National Park in California’s San Joaquin Valley, has grown steadily over the past decade and is expected to continue growing and diversifying as a more affordable alternative to its coastal neighbors. The district now supports more than 1,000 aspiring teachers a year in an array of preservice training programs—some offering thousands of dollars in stipends and tuition support—as well as about 600 early career teachers, who receive ongoing training, intensive coaching and mentoring, and peer support during their first two years in the classroom.
The suite of programs, which have been rolling out since 2009, have helped the district stabilize and diversify its teaching force, said Morales-Young. As of the 2024-25 school year, more than three-quarters of new Fresno teachers have been hired directly from the district’s own programs.
“As an administrator, you have a chance to influence candidates before they’re even released to the district, and preview the people who may be the best fit for your school if you have an opening,” said Hector Lopez, the vice principal of Fresno’s Hoover High School, adding that the approach allows educators “a very comprehensive look at our systems and allows them to hit the ground running when they finally become teachers.”
While in college a decade ago, Lopez worked part-time as a paraeducator and was among the district’s first participants in Fresno’s paraprofessional academy, which helps support staff gain certification to become teachers. His experience convinced him to switch his major from business to education.
From the para academy, Lopez has worked his way through nearly every pipeline program Fresno offers. As a paraprofessional, he joined Fresno’s teacher residency to become a math teacher; nine years later, he entered its leadership academy to earn his administrator credential from San Diego State University, and he later become Hoover’s vice principal.
Now, in his role as a vice principal, he’s back in the pipeline—this time as a mentor for aspiring teachers, and as a supervisor for the high school’s education career pathway.
From students to teachers
Fresno starts early to build the next generation of teachers. Its eight-campus Teacher Academy, which works with high school students interested in teaching, has grown steadily, from 14 students in 2014 to 242 in 2025.
Three days a week, Hoover High senior Nash Tilman and 20 peers take classes on pedagogy and lesson-planning, peer mediation and classroom management, and even first aid and CPR certification. At least once a week, they assist teachers at local schools, from teaching a specific lesson to working with intervention groups.
“Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams / it learned to breathe fresh air,” recited Nash Tilman, 18, as he guided a 6th grade class at Robinson Elementary through a brief poem by the rapper Tupac Shakur one November morning. “Long live the rose that grew from concrete / when no one else ever cared.”
The poem is part of a collection published in 1999, after the rapper’s death and years before Tilman or his students were born. But it was written, Tilman says, when Shakur was a teenager, and it gives his students insight into what young people can accomplish.
“I want you to think about how plants grow. What do they need to grow?” Tilman asks.
A forest of hands, but they wait for Tilman to call on them: Good soil. Water.
He probes them further. “Usually they replace whatever soil or dirt there is with the concrete, right? And so in that crack, not only does it not get the sunlight it needs in the soil to help it grow, but it also doesn’t get a lot of water, since it’s only really seeping in through that crack. So through all of that struggle for the rose, how do you think it managed to grow?”
Tilman’s lesson weaves through discussions of plant and human ecology, poetic metaphors, and even a brief explanation of the myth of Greek myth of Sisyphus, forever pushing a boulder uphill.
“Nash has had a huge positive influence on the kids here,” said Tilman’s supervising teacher Alexandra Douglas. She noted that some normally rowdy tween boys engage with him.
Gen Z teachers say it’s easier to get on the same wavelength as their students. They’re more likely to catch pop references and frame lessons in ways that will resonate with students. They also understand more personally the academic and emotional upheavals students have grappled with in recent years.
“Kids are still going through all these emotions and still figuring out who they are as a person, so they’re going to feel overwhelmed at times,” said Ophelia Ly, 17, a senior and part of Hoover’s Teacher Academy.
Working with early elementary students through the academy has taught her more about how to manage children’s anxiety or misbehavior while keeping them excited about learning. “For students my age and younger, it’s really, really important that we find a teacher that we could really trust; that’s one of the main goals the teacher should have,” she said.
This year, Hoover Principal Courtney Curtis expanded its teacher academy from two to four years. Nearly 98% of the Teachers Academy participants, like Ly and Tilman, are students—and hopefully will one day become teachers—of color. Once students graduate, they are encouraged to remain in the teacher pipeline while in college. The academies offer paid summer internships to teach individual and small groups of students while continuing to take weekly training.
Structuring development around teacher needs
Fresno’s pathways for adults who are already working get them into classrooms quickly, either as student-teachers or as teachers of record. These programs target both district staff like librarians as well as professionals in other industries and help them manage course and credential requirements while they work full-time, and target substitute teachers.
González, for example, wasn’t the only formerly uncredentialed teacher who got both financial and emotional support from the district to complete certification. (Last August, California began requiring early-childhood education teachers to be credentialed in multiple subjects and take 24 college credits in the field.)
Miriam Enriquez, who now can teach transitional kindergarten through 6th grade, said she’s not sure she would have been able to complete those requirements within the five year deadline to meet those requirements. Enriquez said the financial support was critical: Otherwise, she would only have been able to take a couple of classes at Fresno State each semester while working a separate job and caring for her infant son.
“Instead of completing my certification in two years, it would have taken a lot more,” Enriquez said. “It was already challenging, but it would have been even harder.”
Gonzalez said her instructional coach Gutierrez not only helps her with tailoring instruction for her students, but with organizing her schedule to allow more time for her own study.
Professional development focused on issues like student behavior, planning, and time management can be critical to keeping early-career teachers in the classroom long term, according to Hoover Vice Principal Lopez.
“When I’m coaching my teachers, I’m focused on, okay, how do we take some things off your plate?” he said. “How can we use technology or other ways to save you time on some of the more mundane tasks so that we can save your big brain activity for more rigorous planning or instructional strategies to differentiate for the students?”
Building a career ladder to keep young teachers
Once teachers enter the classroom, they also get up to two years of mentoring, with targeted help for special areas like bilingual education and teaching students with disabilities. The programs encourage young teachers to develop cohorts who can support each other within and across campuses.
Learning with other new teachers helped smooth the transition to the classroom for Jose Valadez, a 3rd grade teacher at Birney Elementary and a graduate of Fresno’s intern program, an alternative-certification program for teachers who already have a bachelor’s degree and are switching careers from another industry.
“You’re not doing student-teaching; you are the teacher of record, so you’re learning as you go,” he said. “It helped that I had peers in the same situation that I was in, so we all understood each other.”
For example, aspiring teachers and those in the district’s induction programs can participate in monthly “Saturday academies”—half-day training seminars in which teachers can pick and choose among a dozen or more workshops, from integrating “science of reading” strategies across the curriculum to strengthening individualized education plans for students with disabilities. The seminars build in time for teachers to socialize and collaborate, too.
The regular collaboration with peers and weekly meetings with his induction mentor have helped Valadez to overcome some of the anxiety common in the early years of teaching. Test scores, for example, keep him up at night.
“They’re such a reflection of me … it always makes me rethink, question myself. I get hard on myself,” he said. Learning to analyze his students’ summative assessments with his mentoring coach has made testing data more meaningful and less anxiety-inducing.
“Before induction, I never really realized, ‘Hey, where do you even find the data or know what to do with it?’” Valadez said. “My coaches have taught me that … so I feel like I’m already bettering myself for next year.”