One State’s Educator-Recruitment Campaign Has a Secret Weapon: Its Own Teachers

High school senior and golfer Taylor Haines celebrated her second college “signing day” on Tuesday, at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta—this time not for athletics, but her decision to dedicate her life to teaching.

“I’ve been an educator a long time, and this was the first time I’ve seen them celebrate students like that as educators,” said Taylor’s mom Tonya Haines, a curriculum and instruction specialist for Carroll County public schools, home to her daughter’s school, Central High. “Everybody made such a big deal about Taylor signing to go play golf, but they made just a big of a deal about her signing for education, and I think that’s great.”

The Georgia department of education honored Haines and more than 300 other future educators as part in the first statewide teacher signing day on May 6. More than 1,500 other high school and college students and mid-career professionals also pledged to become teachers at 68 school districts around the state.

The signing ceremony is part of Georgia’s new Teach in the Peach initiative, which launched this year to raise the profile of the teaching profession. The initiative is aimed atboth future and current educators, with the goal of combatting stubborn staffing shortages.

While other states are exploring similar signing events, the Georgia department of education has adopted an unusually comprehensive approach to recruitment and retention: signing bonuses; centralized certification and job-seeker support for new teachers; pension sweeteners to encourage retired teachers to return to the classroom; and efforts to give existing teachers more control over their classes and career progress.

“We’re trying to build pride,” said Christy Todd, Georgia’s 2024 Teacher of the Year, who is now spearheading the initiative. “‘Teach in the Peach’ has really become sort of a rallying cry, not only for our students but for our current teachers. … to encourage people to go into this profession and just to be proud of being a teacher in Georgia.”

The factors making teaching less attractive

Like many states, Georgia has been struggling to find and keep teachers at a time of steadily declining teacher-preparation enrollment and rising public criticism and mistrust of teachers. In Georgia, about 6,000 teacher positions are either open or filled by an instructor who isn’t fully certified. (About 125,000 teachers work in the state, according to a state report.)

Teach in the Peach was sparked by a 2022 report on the Georgia teaching workforce sounding the alarm that younger teachers in the state reported burning out at higher rates than before the pandemic, just as more older teachers entered retirement age. The Learning Policy Institute, a nonprofit that tracks teacher workforce indicators, also deemed the state less attractive to new teachers, in part because teachers reported less involvement in policy decisions and control over their instructional time.

In response, a teacher-run task force advised the state work to reduce high-stakes testing and limit non-instructional responsibilities like hall monitoring, better protect teachers’ planning and collaboration time, and boost teacher mental health and opportunities for professional growth.

In 2024, the state passed a $2,500 raise for all certified K-12 teachers as well as pre-K teachers and assistant teachers. The state also passed a law guaranteeing full-time teachers duty-free planning time, and this spring lawmakers introduced a bill to increase accumulated teacher sick and mental health days from three to five.

School leaders, such as Betsy Bockman, the principal of Midtown High School in Atlanta, have changed school schedules to take non-instructional duties off teachers’ plates and protect their planning time.

The state also launched a centralized job platform in January, through which would-be teachers can create a profile to find credentialing programs, open teacher jobs, and financial planning support with details on cost of living in different communities and retirement benefits available through the state’s pension system.

That portal will allow school districts to highlight incentives they’re offering new teachers and build a playbook of best practices around the state.

“We’re trying to break down the urban legends … just wrong information that’s out there that teachers can’t make a livable wage,” Todd said.

Not all of the state’s efforts have panned out. In 2022, the state legislature passed a law allowing retired teachers to return to work full-time without losing their pension benefits if they had at least 30 years of teaching service and came back to teach in critical subject areas, such as special education or STEM fields.

The law has drawn 635 retired teachers back to the classroom, but a state audit released in April found it had had “minimal impact” considering the scale of the vacancies Georgia schools must fill. About half of school districts have filled teaching positions with about 315 returning retirees each year, representing only 1 percent of the state’s total teaching force. In part, auditors believe the law’s requirement that teachers must be retired for at least a year before returning—intended to prevent active teachers from “double dipping,” or retiring and returning to get both benefits and pay—has led more retired teachers to seek different jobs or stop working altogether.

But overall, the state’s efforts seem to be bearing fruit. This year, Georgia teachers reported the highest morale in the country according to the EdWeek Research Center’s Teacher Morale Index, a component of the media organization’s annual The State of Teaching report. That score, of 47, is more than double the national average of 18, something the state has touted in its recruiting drive. (The score is on a scale of -100 to +100.)

As part of Teach in the Peach, Todd said she has been working to turn some of its veteran teachers into career ambassadors and mentors for others considering teaching careers in the state.

“We know that teachers become teachers because of other teachers, right?” Todd said. “When you ask somebody, ‘Why did you go into the profession?’, they name a teacher. So we have to look at recruiting in our state at the grassroots level … to start with the workforce we already have and make them realize the benefits of teaching in our state.”

That’s crucial for would-be teachers like Taylor Haines, who has faced pushback against her decision to teach.

“Taylor is a smart young lady with great grades and dual enrollment, and she’s had so many people tell her, ‘Really, you’re gonna be a teacher? You could be so much better than that,’” her mother Tonya Haines said. “Society now thinks that smart kids should not be teachers, and she’s already having to face that and justify her calling.”

Taylor received a $500 signing bonus during the Atlanta event toward her plan to earn an education degree at Shorter University in Rome, Ga. It would be the continuation of a family legacy in her hometown of Carrolton, Ga., where her mother taught secondary math for 22 years.

“When I was younger, I was watching my mom, going to pre-planning, going to post-planning, being around all the teachers all the time,” Taylor recalled. “I grew my own little classroom at my house with my little brother.”

Todd said Georgia has invested in career academies like the one Taylor attends in Carroll County to build up the pipeline of future teachers. The program includes increasing time each year observing and serving as a teacher’s aide in district schools, while also taking dual-credit classes to allow students to complete an education degree in three years rather than four.

The Peach State’s dual-credit students are more likely than the average dual-credit student nationwide to enter a four-year degree program after high school, according to an analysis by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Classroom experience also helps excite students about teaching, Taylor said. As a 10th grader serving as a teacher’s aide, Taylor tutored one new English-learner. “Since I was in Spanish 2 … I was able to teach her a little bit of English and get her the basics for her to be a little more prepared,” she said.

This year, as an intern at Central Middle School, Taylor’s former student came up to thank her for her earlier English help.

“It was just super exciting to see what little seed I planted in her to grow throughout all of her years of school,” Taylor said.