Potential student teachers now have another thing to compete for with Pacific School of Learning and Teaching having just received an extension to their grant amount, giving future students the possibility of earning a $22,000 scholarship.
The program is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation Robert Noyce Scholarship Program. Principal Investigator and Director of Pacific Woodburn Campus Kevin Carr, Ph.D, led Pacific’s competition for the scholarship.
“It’s actually combining two different grant sources,” Carr said. “We have the Robert Noyce scholarship, that will start with the group that starts next June, and the rest of it comes from another grant called ELSTEM.”
The two sources are able to combine because both require the recipients to have similar obligations.
“You have to teach for two years in a high-needs school.” Carr said. “You agree to do that in receiving a scholarship, otherwise it turns into a loan.”
The Noyce Scholarship appears in two phases. At first, Pacific was not successful after applying for the grant, but were very close to getting it.
“When I came here to pacific seven years ago, I was able to build on that work that was already done to get funding for our first phase of NOYCE,” Carr said “Which we’ve had for the last five years.”
After receiving the funding of the first phase of NOYCE, Pacific was eligible to apply for the second phase, which had a significantly higher level of competition.
“They funded 60 institutions for phase one the year we did it,” Carr said. “And then for phase two, they funded four to six institutions. What they are looking for are the phase one projects that had a very high amount of institutional change.”
The first phase of the scholarship is what allowed Pacific to open the Woodburn campus in 2012. It was the scholarship money that initially attracted candidates there.
The National Science Foundation thought that was great.” Carr said. “They were also impressed that we created a modified version of the degree specifically to train for stem teachers to work for English Language Learners. Not other many projects do that. That was what put us in the realm.”
Under the new grant, the School of Learning and Teaching is now able to be more visible in national recruiting. When recruiters go in to find potential candidates for the Health Professions Programs, they will also be searching for candidates for student teachers.
‘We have enough grant money for ten per year,’ Carr said. “But we might give to more students the first year, depending on the candidates. We’ll have 40 scholars by the end of the five years of the first year we will be recruiting.”
Students can expect the competition for a slot in this teaching program to be as high as ever for the next class in June 2015.
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