BY DANIEL VICTOR
Of The Patriot-News
It seemed no one was able to reach the child.
He didn’t talk much, or do much work in school. He was poor, black, and no teacher in the Steelton-Highspire School District had ever connected with him.
Then came his fourth-grade teacher, Kelly Mosby-Fowlkes. She, too, was black. She, too, grew up in Steelton. She, too, came from humble beginnings.
He started to trust her, and he worked for her.
One year later, he went to another school, and Mosby-Fowlkes got a call from his new teacher. The boy talked about Mosby-Fowlkes all the time, she said. The new teacher wanted to know: How did Mosby-Fowlkes get through to the child?
“It’s all about that relationship,” said Mosby-Fowlkes, now an assistant principal at Steelton-Highspire Elementary School. “And it’s something, when you share the same ethnic background, it’s just something special there. It just raises that level of comfort, of ease, of understanding.”
Most educators agree on the value of minority teachers, both for their ability to provide role models to the rising number of minority students and to battle stereotypes in the minds of white students. Some school districts said they recruit minority teachers.
So why are there so few of them?
The difficulty
Every school faces different challenges in attracting minority teachers, but they share one big problem: There aren’t enough candidates out there.
In the 2006-07 school year, only four midstate school districts had more than six minority teachers: Carlisle, Central Dauphin, Harrisburg and Susquehanna Twp., according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
Most districts had fewer than three. Seven districts had none.
In all of the schools, the percentage of minority teachers lagged far behind the percentage of minority students.
The subject has been a passion of Mark Holman, director of human resources for the Harrisburg School District. The district has one of the state’s highest rates of minority teachers, 23 percent, a rate that is still far behind the district’s minority student population of nearly 95 percent.
He cites several reasons for the shortage. The federal No Child Left Behind law has made it more difficult for mid-career transfers into education, which is where districts often find minority candidates.
Minority students statistically score lower on entrance exams, and a higher GPA requirement thins the field further, he said.
Many minority parents are encouraging their children to go into more profitable careers, he said.
“If you want to have more African-American teachers, you have to get more African-American parents to send their sons and daughters to school to become teachers,” Holman said.
And though administrators from several districts said they recruit at historically black colleges, such as Cheyney University and Lincoln University in eastern Pennsylvania, those colleges produce few teachers, and it can be difficult to lure them away from bigger cities.
“I love central Pennsylvania,” said David Volkman, superintendent of Susquehanna Twp. School District. “But when we recruit at historically black colleges, sometimes it’s difficult to get folks to commit to us, because of where we are.”
Several districts say they focus on keeping in touch with alumni who are going to college to study education, hoping they’ll want to return.
For a district such as Steelton-Highspire, which has low teacher wages for the area, home ties often aren’t enough.
“We’ve had a number of cases where we actually recruited folks and had them move into the area,” Superintendent Norma Mateer said. “But after two or three years, they realized they could get much more money in a suburban district near us.”
The role model
James Sledge, an English teacher at Susquehanna Twp. High School, tells some of his students that he loves them as they leave class. About half of the students in his class are nonwhite.
A black man from Birmingham, Ala., Sledge was led to education by his family. Altruistic reasons and support from the district kept him in the job, he said.
“It allows students to see there are different types of people of color,” he said.
Tamira Howard, who is black, is hard on some of the black males in her class.
Howard knows that, before they come to her American Government or AP European History classes at Central Dauphin East High School, they’ve been labeled as trouble-makers.
But the Susquehanna Twp. High School alumna demands their respect and suspects they do respect her more than some of their other teachers. They’re not used to having black teachers.
“They need to see people like them that can do great things,” Howard said.
There’s a benefit to the white students, too, said Mary Kay Durham, superintendent of Carlisle Area School District.
“It helps all students realize we’re just a microcosm of the rest of the world, and it helps them learn about others and appreciate everyone,” she said.
Looking ahead, there are reasons for both hope and worry, Holman said.
Hope comes in the form of more competitive teacher salaries and the job stability of teaching when other industries are downsizing or restructuring. Teachers can be fairly confident that they’ll have jobs until they’re ready to retire, he said.
But the rising teacher standards, and the ability to make more money elsewhere, will continue to work against schools, he said.
“Every child should have the opportunity to see someone that looks like them as a role model,” Holman said. “By kids seeing people in these roles, they someday can see themselves in that role.”