News Center Maine features COEHD’s “Why Teach” campaign
News Center Maine reported on the University of Maine College of Education and Human Development’s “Why Teach” promotional campaign, which features testimonies from current and former UMaine students about why they want to be teachers. The campaign launched during the Winter Olympics to address teacher shortages in Maine and nationwide. The News Center Maine story quotes UMaine senior SooZin Cha, who is doing her student teaching at Brewer Community School. “This placement has really shown me that it’s so much fun to be in the classroom, and I’m really enjoying what I’m doing,” Cha said. Dean Penny Bishop discussed the challenges of recruiting people to become teachers and helping them stay in the profession. “Nationally, the numbers of people choosing to go into teaching preparation programs are down 30%, and that was before the pandemic,” Bishop said. “When our students have to come out with the same sort of debt load as an engineer or as someone in business, and yet we know that the salary earnings will be pretty significantly different, we need to ask ourselves how we can reimagine that system.”