School districts in Missouri and beyond are shopping for teachers from places like Ghana, the Philippines, and Venezuela, despite the high cost and communication issues in the classroom.
The Hazelwood School District is among the latest districts to solicit bids from international teacher recruitment firms to fill dozens of teacher positions, potentially paying between $4,700 and $18,500 per recruit, according to documents obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The district joins Riverview Gardens, St. Louis Public Schools and Normandy Schools Collaborative in Missouri soliciting teachers from abroad, a process that some complain is causing issues in the classroom.
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“Administrators said the teachers brought with them years of experience and excelled in the classroom, but some parents have since complained students have to use their phones to translate for some of the teachers,” the Post-Dispatch reports.
Other problems stem from the new teachers’ struggle to secure housing and food, and a disconnect with students in the predominantly Black, low-income districts.
How Hazelwood expects to avoid similar issues is unclear. A district spokesperson ignored repeated requests for comment on the recruitment efforts from the Post-Dispatch.
The news site notes a board of education presentation on teacher recruitment in November only briefly mentioned international teachers, and there was no discussion among board members.
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It’s also unclear how much the recruitment effort will cost taxpayers, as teacher placement fees for teachers range from $5,000 to $20,000, and the agencies allow districts to cover that cost.
Hazelwood is among districts that use the for-profit education management group Stride for virtual teachers piped into classrooms to educate students remotely at a cost of over $100,000 per teacher, plus $35,000 to $51,000 for a classroom monitor, according to the district’s contract cited by the Post-Dispatch.
“Our overall plan is to try to reduce our dependency on vendor provided supplemental instruction support by at least 50%,” Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Keith Bausman said at a November board meeting.
The shift toward international teachers is part of a broader trend involving school districts in numerous states in recent years.
Michigan’s Ypsilanti Community Schools in June inked an agreement with the International Alliance Group to hire international teachers for hard-to-fill positions. The company works with more than 100 school districts across the country to fill teaching positions in languages, special education, math and science, MLive reports.
In Minnesota, dozens of teachers from the Philippines are staffing classrooms in the Fridley, Moorhead, Red Lake, Climax-Shelly and Willmar school districts, as well as some charter schools, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
At least 117 teachers from Kenya, Ghana, India, Jamaica, and elsewhere work in Baltimore schools, as well, where the educators on H-1B visas can work for up to six years before required renewal while working toward permanent residency, Cera Doering, who heads Baltimore’s program, told The Baltimore Banner.
“We really wanted to bring teachers in that brought cultural awareness at a much more global level and also mirrored a lot of where our children are from,” Doering said.
In Hazelwood, the district’s request for proposals netted six bids – two from law firms offering assistance in the visa process and four from teacher recruitment agencies.
The latter specialize in bringing in teachers from Turkey, India, Kenya, Venezuela and Ghana, among other countries, according to KTVI.
With the recruitment process well under way, some have questioned what other additional supports the district intends to provide, such as housing assistance, legal counseling, and orientation.
“We have not completed our plan yet but will be having things set up for them upon their arrival,” the district wrote to one vendor who inquired.