James Davis: “we face, over the next 10 years, a need to hire over 2.2 million new teachers in this country. In my home, the Tampa Bay…”

“we face, over the next 10 years, a need to hire over 2.2 million new teachers in this country. In my home, the Tampa Bay area, 7,000 new teachers we will need over the next 10 years. The problem is there is already a cut. School districts around the country are already starting to experience a lot of difficulty in attracting qualified teachers. Well, today we can adopt a solution to that. We can adopt an amendment that is a Transition to Teaching Act, that will allow people who aspire to be teachers to go back to school to qualify for up to a $5,000 grant to cover their tuition and fees. In return, they must meet the same high standards that anyone else would need to be certified in their particular State, and they must spend at least 3 years teaching in a school with a high level of poverty, the schools having the greatest difficulty attracting the teachers we need today. Most importantly, we are finding that around the country people that are prepared to move from the boardroom to the classroom, from the police station on Main Street to the school on Main Street, are valuable teachers. They are using their life experience to reach out to kids, to help them get excited and engaged in learning. This amendment adopts the President's budget proposal of $25 million to start this program. It has bipartisan support. It has passed unanimously in both the House and the Senate.”