Mississippi schools recruit teachers outside US

Hundreds of educators from the Philippines, India and elsewhere from outside the U.S. are in Mississippi classrooms teaching in hard-to-fill positions and in rural areas.

Superintendents in Jackson Public Schools, Noxubee County, Holmes County, Meridian and Gulfport have all hired foreign teachers on temporary visas called H-1Bs, along with others. According to MDE, there are 451 teachers in the state with degrees from outside the country.

School officials in Noxubee County three years ago began working with an agency that helps recruit teachers from the Philippines.

The district, which is classified by the state education department as one of 48 critical shortage areas, had difficulty filling special education positions. Former Special Education Director Darlene Cole said the district also had trouble finding speech language pathologists to work with students with communicative disorders.

Cole began working with Ligaya Avenida, the CEO of California-based Avenida International Consultants Inc., an agency that helps school districts employ qualified Filipino teachers.

“I would tell her what kind of teachers I needed, and she would send me some resumes. I’d review the resumes, and then we actually — one year they actually funded one of our employees to go over there (to the Philippines) and conduct the interviews in person,” Cole described.

During other years, Cole would interview the candidates on Skype.

Once the interviews were complete and the school board approved the hires, Avenida began working on the visa process for the employees, who often pay her company a fee of about $10,000 to cover visa fees, transcripts, airfare and housing, among other expenses.

Cole, who was the special education director from 2004 to 2015, said it was only in the last few years of her career that finding teachers became such a problem that the district began looking outside the country.

“It got harder and harder to find certified teachers, and in the rural area we live in, our district supplement isn’t that much, so it doesn’t attract people to come here to this high-poverty area,” she said. “And the housing — we just don’t have the apartment complexes that other cities have … They’d rather go to Starkville, Louisville, rather than come to Macon is what I perceived.”

Macon, the county seat of Noxubee County, has around 3,100 residents. The median household income from 2009-2013 has been $24,338, according to the U.S. Census.

“The people we hired in special ed and for speech language pathologists are doing an excellent job. They were very thorough — they just did everything real professional and on time,” Cole recalled of the hires.

Cole said eight of the teachers she worked to hire are still in the district, and seven have left. Although the transition for some was an adjustment, she was pleased overall.

“Just moving from one city to another within the United States is an adjustment, and to come over here to get acclimated to a whole different culture and whole different country took some time to adjust … This is a good thing, it has been for us,” she said.

Avenida, whose agency works specifically with teachers in the Philippines, said she has worked with around five school districts in Mississippi in the past three to four years.

“There’s a growing need in Mississippi,” Avenida said.

Many districts struggle to find qualified math and science teachers.

However, the Mississippi Department of Education’s recent policy change requiring teachers be certified by an American program poses a challenge, according to Avenida.

“By changing the licensing requirements where they do not accept teaching coursework, academic coursework from the Philippines … It slows down or doesn’t encourage teachers to come to Mississippi because of that,” she said.

The Mississippi Department of Education said the policy regarding international reciprocity wasn’t so much a change but a clarification based on state law that says certification must come from a nationally accredited program.

“The process has changed. It doesn’t prevent any teacher from coming to teach in Mississippi, but they have to follow a different process,” state education department spokeswoman Patrice Guilfoyle explained.

Foreign teachers in Mississippi must now obtain an expert citizen’s license, one-year teaching licenses issued by the Mississippi Department of Education to people with certain business and professional experience. They must then go through a Mississippi teacher certification program to obtain a valid license.

Teachers already in Mississippi who received their license under international reciprocity will have to go through the same process when their current license expires.

Higher salaries, fewer teachers

Despite Mississippi’s low teacher salaries compared to other states, many teachers who come here from overseas are making more than they did at home.

Avenida said even in some areas where teacher salaries are in the mid-$30,000 range, “it is still maybe about four times more than what teachers are making in the Philippines.”

But teachers who use her services must also factor in visa and relocation costs.

Noxubee County Superintendent Kevin Jones, whose district of 1,775 students employs about seven foreign teachers, said the challenge of finding qualified teachers in the local area has “gotten worse every year.”

Adding to the dilemma is the increasing number of teachers eligible for retirement.

“As teachers retire, and we have teachers who are eligible to retire, the pool to replace them is not there anymore …,” Jones said. “Then the vacancies that do open up, the teacher education candidates are going to go where they can get the highest salaries, better social amenities, and the smaller, poorer districts are left trying to fill those vacancies.”

The starting salary for a teacher with no experience in Noxubee County is $33,715.

David Rock, the dean of the University of Mississippi’s school of education, said he believes the increase in requirements for entrance to teacher education programs is one reason numbers are down.

“The other issue is this perception about teaching and really about whether or not teaching can be a profession where you can actually support yourself,” Rock said, noting the need for efforts to make teaching a more desirable and viable profession.

Rock referred to Georgia, where math and science teachers are automatically bumped up to a higher salary level their first year of teaching.

Ole Miss, in a rare partnership with Mississippi State University, started the Mississippi Excellence in Teaching Program that offers a full scholarship to high-performing students intending to major in math or English education.

“Four years ago before the program started at Ole Miss, we had five students (majoring in education) that had an ACT of 28 or above,” Rock recalled. “The next year, we had 27; the following year, we had 43 with an ACT of 28 or above … That’s just incredible, but it’s costing some money to convince people to go into the field.”

“We need help with it. We need help providing funding not only for people coming to college for that but also stipends to make it affordable,” Rock said.

The number of people graduating with education degrees from universities in Mississippi has dropped since the 2005 school year. In 2006, 1,282 people graduated with an education degree from the eight public universities across the state, compared to 1,091 in 2014, the most recent data available. That’s a nearly 15 percent drop.

The numbers dipped even lower in 2008, when 1,039 graduated with education degrees.

The decrease can also be seen in programs like Teach for America and Mississippi Teacher Corps, the University of Mississippi’s master’s program that places college graduates in high-poverty public schools across the state.

This school year, Teach for America had 145 first-year teachers in Mississippi, compared to 201 during the 2012 school year. The number declined every year in between. Likewise, Andy Mullins of the Mississippi Teacher Corps said the number of applications to the program is down by 20 percent this year.

Foreign teachers around the country

Marc Taylor, an immigration law attorney in New York, works with school districts across the country looking to hire teachers from overseas.

“It’s about demand and supply basically. You have areas of the United States where it’s very difficult to get qualified, highly educated teachers,” Taylor said. “A lot of these foreign nationals not only have one degree but actually have multiple — sometimes two, three, four degrees and are highly motivated to take advantage of the U.S. dream, working wherever is necessary to effectuate the end goal.”

The H-1B visa requires the applicant have a bachelor’s degree, and it is often used by foreigners in professions such as computer science and health. In Mississippi in 2013, the majority of people on H-1B visas in the state were computer programmers, computer systems analysts and software developers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

There were 30 physicians and surgeons and 26 classified as “computer occupations and all other.”

The Arizona Republic reported last year that schools in Arizona were also hiring teachers from out of the country to fill vacancies, particularly in rural Casa Grande, located halfway between Phoenix and Tucson.

Closer to Mississippi, neighboring Alabama hired only a couple of international teachers on H-1B visas last year, while Louisiana hired hundreds, according to Labor Department data.

“I can say that from my perspective it is happening throughout the country, and I don’t think it’s only in high-need areas such as Jackson. I think that it’s part of the fabric of what the United States is — it’s the country of immigrants,” Taylor said. “It may be more noticeable or apparent in lower population or rural areas where you don’t have a diversity of culture, so it stands out, but I don’t believe it’s anything other than the normal desire of individuals to migrate to the U.S. and for the benefits it offers.”

Contact Kate Royals at (601) 360-4619 orkroyals@gannett.com. Follow @KRRoyals on Twitter. 

School districts that hired teachers on H-1B visas: 

Gulfport School District

Natchez-Adams School District

Holmes County School District

Meridian Public School District

McComb School District

Sunflower Consolidated School District

Clarksdale Municipal School District

Noxubee County School District

Copiah County School District

Coffeeville School District

South Delta School District

Yazoo City School District

*data from U.S. Department of Labor covers period of Oct. 1, 2014 through Sept. 30, 2015.