Jerania Mancilla, a special education assistant teacher who is taking part in CCSDs Paraprofessionals Pathway Program, is interviewed at C.C. Ronow Elementary School Thursday, March 3, 2022.
Friday, March 4, 2022 | 2 a.m.
The Clark County School District is looking close to home to grow its teacher corps at a time of need.
The district announced its “When You Grow, We All Grow” recruitment campaign on Thursday, highlighting how school staffers in support roles can become licensed teachers and how people with degrees in other fields can take a fast track toward teacher certification.
It comes as CCSD is struggling to attract and retain teachers. Data from the human resources department shows that CCSD has about 100 fewer teachers than it did at the start of the school year in August. The district had want ads for about 1,400 licensed positions as of this week.
One educator who is motivated to stay the course while moving up is Jerania Mancilla, a special education teacher’s aide at C.C. Ronnow Elementary School in Las Vegas.
Mancilla has been an aide for three years, and for the last two of them, she’s been taking part-time classes at College of Southern Nevada to advance her career.
Mancilla became a teacher’s assistant not long after graduating from high school in 2018. Her love for teaching started as a sixth-grader, when a teacher at O’Callaghan Middle School saw her aptitude for math and encouraged her to lead her classmates in a lesson.
Mancilla said the challenges of the pandemic reminded her how much she wanted to stick with teaching, and CCSD’s staffing crisis shows her how much she’s needed here.
“I don’t consider it a job,” she said. “I consider it a passion.”
Once she’s completed 60 college credits she’ll qualify for a new UNLV program called the Paraprofessional Pathways Program, a cornerstone of CCSD’s “When You Grow, We All Grow” campaign. The program started last summer with 36 instructional aides, said Myron Carter, a director for diversity and workforce development in CCSD’s human resources division.
In January, the program started another cohort of about 60, this one drawing from all types of support workers. UNLV is now accepting applications for its next cohort. Graduates will earn a bachelor’s degree and be qualified to lead classrooms, drawing on practical experiences.
“It’s a no brainer. It costs the state nothing,” Carter said.
It also promotes faculty diversity in an urban district where about 36% of teachers and 33% of administrators identify as non-white, while about 57% of students are young people of color, according to district and state department of education data.
Support staff, though, is more representative of the student body, with about two-thirds identifying as non-white.
The traditional path to becoming a teacher — majoring in education at a four-year college, student teaching in the final year to get hands-on experience in a classroom — is dwindling, said Michelee Crawford-Cruz, the Ronnow principal.
Crawford-Cruz is proud of that, and proud that Ronnow Elementary embraces alternative paths to becoming a teacher. It’s how she got where she is today.
Crawford-Cruz attended UNLV with the goal of becoming a psychiatrist. She majored in psychology and math. But she tried substitute teaching about 20 years ago and found her true career calling.
For her doctoral studies, she looked at barriers to career advancement for support staff, especially among diverse backgrounds. She found that a state rule required support staffers to take a leave of absence to complete their student teaching, even though the student teaching was substantially the same as the work they were already doing as aides. So she was active in the passage of a state law last year that allows working instructional aides to apply their daily work toward their certifications.
About 20% of Ronnow’s teachers took an alternative pathway, she said.
For aspiring teachers who already have a bachelor’s degree in another field, UNLV has the Accelerated Alternate Route to Licensure program. This grants a master’s degree in education and qualifications for teacher licensure in a single academic year.
William Copeland has a similar story to Crawford-Cruz. He studied biology, started subbing, and now, he has a room full of fourth graders at Ronnow.
During a language arts lesson today, he introduced his pupils to themes.
“Theme is a message or a big idea,” he said. He used the example that money can’t buy happiness.
Purpose, he said, creates happiness.
