Saturday, November 03, 2007 198 more Pinoy educators to teach in US schools
AT LEAST 198 out of the 300 Filipino teacher-applicants who passed the rigid screening early this year that was conducted by school officials from Maryland, United States will fly out of the country in two batches starting this month to assume their new teaching positions offered to them with a promised US$43,841 starting salary even for a teacher with an undergraduate degree.
Quoting a report from Maryland's Gazette, recruited teachers will be distributed in several schools in Maryland, the second largest school district in the US, over the next 12 months.
Twenty-eight of the new recruits will start in Prince George's County schools this month while another 170 will be coming in for the 2008-2009 academic year beginning August next year, it said.
The teachers can stay and teach in the county for six years with temporary citizenship after which they can be allowed to apply for US citizenship or will opt to go back to the Philippines.
It was learned that county district officials started hiring 80 Filipino teachers in 2005 and this was followed by 107 more Filipino teachers last year.
The report also said US schools preferred to hire Filipino teachers because accreditation requirements are almost similar with that of the Philippines and the US.
"Maryland universities and colleges graduate about 2,500 teachers annually. Prince George's County, which hires more than 1,000 new teachers every year, must compete with 23 other state school districts for those new teachers," the report further quoted.
"We're not training the teachers in the US, so we need to start looking at places where there are more teachers," said school board chairman Owen Johnson, who helped interview teacher-applicants. "They recognize our shortages. They have been very aggressive in getting us to come and recruit," he said.
Since 2002, Prince George's has recruited more than 400 Filipino educators. (AH/Sunnex)
