By PHYLLIS ZORN

Staff writer

Centre, Herington, Hillsboro, Marion, and Peabody-Burns schools, in cooperation with the Technology Excellence in Education Network, are working on a proposal they hope will garner more local teachers.

The proposal also would bring local high school graduates back to their home county.

Interim Marion superintendent Lee Leiker was enthusiastic about the program, which was presented Monday to Hillsboro’s school board and will be presented next week to the Marion school board.

If a local graduate earns a degree in education and returns to his or her home — or a neighboring TEEN district — the graduate would receive a stipend of up to $10,000 as an incentive, half at the end of each of his or her first and second years of teaching.

“Superintendents talk about how finding teachers is getting harder and harder to do,” Leiker said. “There are fewer and fewer people to go into teaching. What we’re proposing to do is kind of a grow-your-own type program. It’s a way to have young people come back to the area to teach. It will also give them an incentive to teach.”

Getting teacher applications has been harder and harder each year. Leiker said. Some courses, such as mathematics, special education, English, and science, have an especially thin pool of applicants.

“The key, to me, that makes it exciting is, it’s an incentive to get people to go into education and it’s an incentive to get them to come back to their hometowns,” Leiker said.

Under the proposal, any student who graduates from a TEEN school and completes a college degree in education, then comes back to a TEEN school district to teach, will receive a stipend for the first two years.

The stipend will be paid by the district in which the teaching was completed.

If the student returns to a graduating district within three years of obtaining their teaching degree, he or she will receive stipends of up to $10,000 total.

The stipend will be paid in two payments of $5,000 at the end of each of the first two years.

If the student returns to a different TEEN district, he or she will get up to $5,000 from that district.

The stipend will be paid in two payments of $2,500 at the end of each of the first two years.

If the student returns to his or her graduating district and then moves to another TEEN district for a second year of teaching, the stipend will be $7,500. The home district will pay $5,000 at the end of the first year, and the second district will pay $2,500 at the end of the second year.

If the student’s first year of teaching is at a different TEEN district, payments will be reversed.