Durham Public Schools, Duke Announce Three New Initiatives to Support Teaching

The initiatives will increase Spanish fluency among teachers and staff members, among other things

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

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Durham, N.C. -- Durham Public Schools (DPS) Superintendent Ann T. Denlinger and Duke University President Richard H. Brodhead announced Wednesday that DPS and Duke are expanding their longstanding partnership with three new initiatives designed to significantly boost support for classroom teachers.

Over the next three years, the university will contribute $925,000 to assist DPS by providing scholarships to Duke graduate students who are pursuing advanced teaching degrees, increasing fluency in Spanish among teachers and staff members, and helping retain early-career teachers. The programs are expected to provide direct support for as many as 200 DPS teachers who work with approximately 6,000 public school students.

The new initiatives are:

-- The Durham Teaching Fellows program. Duke will provide full tuition and stipend support for the next three years to train 24 teachers (eight teachers per year) in the pursuit of Master of Arts in Teaching degrees from Duke. In exchange, teachers would agree to commit at least two years of teaching core subjects in DPS high schools. The anticipated scholarship amount exceeds $43,000 per teacher for the 2006-07 school year. The Duke MAT program is not intended for current DPS teachers who are seeking a master's degree in their teaching area.  

-- The Spanish Language Leap program. Each August for the next three years, faculty from the Department of Romance Studies will provide an intensive three-day training in conversational Spanish for 30 staff and faculty members in four schools near campus that have large Hispanic populations: E.K. Powe Elementary, Lakewood Elementary, George Watts Montessori and Forest View Elementary. These schools are part of the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership. The training will continue throughout the school year, during weekly after-school training sessions. Teachers will have access to Duke’s online language instruction and language lab and will have the opportunity to participate in a weeklong immersion experience in Mexico.

-- A bolstered teacher retention effort. Duke’s Center for Teacher Learning and Collaboration will provide mentoring support for more than 90 DPS teachers who have taught between three and seven years (30 teachers a year.)  They will participate in a two-day residential workshop focused on personal renewal, professional growth, and teacher empowerment. The workshop will be followed by one year of follow-up sessions. This program will also give teachers a “jump start” on the National Board Certification process.  

Durham Public Schools’ Hispanic student population has increased significantly over the last decade. Lakewood Elementary School, site of today’s news conference, is a prime example of this growth. In 1995-96, 3 percent of the school’s students were identified as Hispanic. Today, that number has grown to 42 percent.

Nationally, the attrition rate for new teachers is nearly 50 percent. In their first three years of teaching, approximately 42 percent of initially licensed teachers leave DPS, slightly higher than the statewide attrition average for new teachers. Last year, Duke pledged $300,000 over three years through a grant from The Duke Endowment, a Charlotte-based charitable trust, to support the New Teacher Center, which pairs some 30 seasoned teachers who each serve as mentors to about 15 first- and second-year teachers. 

“Duke University’s latest commitment to assisting Durham Public Schools in supporting our teachers is just one more in a very lengthy list of invaluable collaborations, including the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership,” Denlinger said. “We are extremely grateful to President Brodhead for these latest collaborative initiatives and know that they will work wonderfully well to attract and retain top-quality teachers, thereby significantly increasing the instructional quality we provide to our students and their families. We are especially pleased that one component of this partnership specifically will work to better serve our fast-growing Hispanic population.”

The Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership, launched in 1996, works to improve the quality of life in 12 neighborhoods closest to campus and to boost student achievement and teacher effectiveness in seven partner public schools that are located in or serve those neighborhoods: Durham School of the Arts, E.K. Powe Elementary, Forest View Elementary, George Watts Montessori Elementary, Lakewood Elementary and Rogers Herr Year-Round Middle School. Duke, for example, is offering a weeklong Spanish immersion experience in Central America for principals at the Neighborhood Partnership schools. Last year, at President Brodhead’s request, Duke created a new full-time position to help place Spanish-speaking Duke student tutors in several Durham schools and Neighborhood Partnership community centers.

“Universities make extremely important contributions to the growth of knowledge and the strength of our culture and economy,” Brodhead said. “But every success in higher education relies on great schooling at the earlier levels: you can’t build the house until you have laid the foundation. For this reason, Duke is eager to support the devoted work done in the Durham Public Schools. The new programs will help recruit and retain excellent teachers and equip experienced teachers to meet new challenges. We’re grateful to the Durham Public Schools for the cooperative spirit that makes this new partnership possible.”