Borderland colleges working to recruit future educators to meet local demand

EL PASO, Texas -- While almost all borderland students are currently on their fall break, students at local colleges studying to become teachers are still working hard to get their degrees.

We asked local colleges if the pandemic is making an impact on people becoming future educators. 

The dean of utep's college of education says enrollment this semester compared to other years is pretty flat. There about 19 hundred underrated and graduate students enrolled.

Dr. Clinton Tanabe says the pandemic could be a factor, but the good news, overall the college has seen an increase in enrollment over the last 4 years.. 

Dr. Tanabe assures they are working hard to make sure they can help local school districts have enough teachers. This comes as many of them are dealing with staffing shortages in almost every field.

He also mentioned, like school district across the region, some education students are also dealing with some sort of learning loss.

"We need to work hard to understand where our students are (that includes some) assessments early on," he said. "We want to make sure that we especially account for where they are going into their year-long residency, because it's a highly intensive practice based performance item in our curriculum pathway. So we it's usually an individualized diagnosis that we've been working on."

Graduation rates are also picking up. There was a slight dip in between years including in 2021 after the height of the pandemic, but rates increased during the spring of 2022.

Dr. Tanabe says UTEP is working on a campaign to be able to help local school districts meet their demands. 

"So some of that will be through some promotional activities, lots of industrial partnerships, he said. "How do we encourage our school district partners to work with us a little more tightly on identifying high school students who might be interested in teaching in the education profession, get some information to those students and those families early so that they have pathways into the programs that we have in the region so that they can return back to the schools and be great teachers."

ABC-7 asked NMSU if they saw any impact on enrollment for future educators because of the pandemic but was unable to get specific numbers. However the university as a whole saw its largest freshman class since 2009. UTEP also breaking records, hitting all-time high freshman enrollment. A clear sign people are ready to go back to school.