David Price: “As we build additional classrooms, as we get children into lower class sizes, especially in the early grades, we are…”

“As we build additional classrooms, as we get children into lower class sizes, especially in the early grades, we are going to need quality teachers to teach those children. As a matter of fact, we are confronting a teacher shortage in this country, and it is going to get a great deal worse before it gets better. The estimates are we will need to hire 2 million new teachers in the United States over the next 10 years; and in North Carolina, we are going to need to find 80,000 new teachers. Believe me, that is a great deal more than we are producing at the present time. That is a lot of manpower and woman power we are going to need to bring into the classroom. This 100,000 new teachers proposal of the Presidents is an important down payment on that, and, goodness knows, we should not go home before we do that. I cannot imagine we could do any less than bring on an additional installment of those 100,000 new teachers in the classroom.”