‘A game changer’: New virtual learning program addresses Mississippi’s teacher shortage ...Middle East

Thanks to a new partnership between the Mississippi Department of Education and Mississippi Public Broadcasting, students across the state will be getting new teachers this year. 

But those teachers won’t be in classrooms, sitting behind desks. They’ll be on the screen. 

The REACH MS program, also called the Mississippi Virtual Synchronous Learning Initiative, funded by a $2.2 million appropriation from the Legislature, is a response to the teacher shortage afflicting swaths of Mississippi schools. 

There are thousands of vacant teaching posts in Mississippi, according to a recent MDE survey. While the virtual-teacher program doesn’t replace recruitment efforts, said associate state superintendent Bryan Marshall, it’s one of the state’s latest attempts to address the teacher shortage. Those include a revamped teacher recruitment website and increased funding to pay tuition and licensure expenses for college students who commit to teaching in “critical shortage areas.” That’s a category that 56% of Mississippi school districts fall into. 

Participating districts that are struggling to staff core subjects can get a virtual teacher through the program. All they have to do is make sure special-education students are accommodated, enter grades and attendance, provide a classroom, in-person facilitators and reliable internet. 

Five districts — Hinds County, Yazoo County, Yazoo City, Claiborne and West Point — are part of the pilot program, as well as three certified teachers and three teacher assistants who are college students on the cusp of finishing their teaching degrees. 

In this way, Marshall says the initiative addresses the state’s teacher shortage in two ways: staffing hard-to-teach subject areas and strengthening the teacher pipeline.

“The idea is that we would keep the student teachers for a period, and then they would go on into the classroom, and we’d bring on a new set,” Marshall said. “We’re trying to provide resources to districts without taking teachers away from them.”

It’s clear the agency is proud of the new program and optimistic about what it can accomplish. State Superintendent Lance Evans has been publicly championing the initiative for the past year — at Capitol hearings, board meetings and press events. A powerpoint about REACH MS claims each teacher has the capacity to serve up to 450 students. 

Post-pandemic, though, it’s hard not to wonder if the program is promising more than it can deliver. Research shows that when education is online, student learning, focus and engagement suffer.

But the agency — and students — argue that this initiative, with its classroom setting and in-person facilitators, is different.

The classroom experience

Teenagers in red-collared shirts and khaki pants peer over their laptops at their teacher, Caitlin Perkins. She’s at the front of the Yazoo City High School classroom, giving a lesson on how to write thesis statements. 

In actuality, she’s about an hour away at the Mississippi Public Broadcasting offices in Jackson, but it doesn’t seem to matter to the students.  

They’re engaged, paying rapt attention to their on-screen teacher and even answering her questions out loud. Another teacher, on what’s supposed to be her planning period break, walks around as an in-person facilitator, keeping students quiet and passing out worksheets. 

It’s pretty close to what Sametra Brown, assistant superintendent of federal programs, imagined when the agency reached out about the district’s participation in the virtual teacher program. 

“In a critical teacher shortage area, these are certified teachers,” she said. “We felt that this would be a wonderful opportunity for our students to still have a highly qualified certified educator in front of them, but give them that virtual experience.” 

Yazoo City Municipal School District has struggled for a long time, in general. 

The district was merged with Humphreys County School District in 2019, creating Mississippi’s first Achievement School District. The partnership created a single state-run district in an effort to turn the low-performing schools around. The districts divorced this summer but remain under state control. 

While the state education department reports that there are almost 3,000 open teaching jobs across Mississippi, teacher shortages disproportionately impact schools with high rates of poverty and larger minority student populations. 

More than a third of children under 18 in Yazoo County live in poverty, 2020 Census data shows. Data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows the 2023 median household income in Yazoo County was $42,434.

Yazoo City, which dropped from a C grade to an F in the latest district rankings, currently has 10 open teaching positions, administrators said. Three of those are at the high school, with two in core subject areas. Staffing challenges, ample national research shows, directly impact student achievement.

The program, Marshall said, was created for districts such as Yazoo City.

“Many people are not going into education now, so that’s a challenge,” Brown said, of the district’s staffing struggles. “We have to be creative in how we attract and retain teachers … Rather than our students having a substitute teacher in the classroom that has maybe no credentials, this was an opportunity for them to get live instruction.”

The virtual teacher came as a shock to Rodrianna Drain, Mikeria Brown and Devin Gibbs, three of the 14-year-olds in Perkins’ ninth-grade English class. They’re among some of the top students in the high school. School leaders chose the cream of the crop, they said, for the pilot program to better prepare them for online college classes and an increasingly virtual world. 

But now that the surprise has worn off, Brown actually prefers the virtual element over her other classes. She largely does classwork online, and typing out answers to writing prompts gives her time to think through her responses instead of immediately answering out loud. 

It makes sense that the set-up is appealing to this generation of students, who spent a chunk of their education learning at home during the pandemic. 

However, another vestige of pandemic-era learning is throwing some wrenches into the program: Technology problems. 

Perkins’ lesson buffered a little, her face momentarily frozen while her class waited patiently. The students noted that occasionally the computers are slow and the Wi-Fi sometimes goes out. 

Those issues are usually quickly resolved and the kinks are worth it, they said. The three students really like Perkins, one of the program’s student teachers, describing her as a dramatic storyteller when she reads out loud which makes it easier for them to engage with the text. 

“We’re not just writing more, but we’re actually understanding more about it,” Drain said. “She talks to us like she’s one of us.” 

Before she logs off, Perkins confirms the students don’t have any more questions. Then they wave goodbye, and the screen goes black.  

Futuristic technology

Much of what makes the virtual teacher program stand out compared to pandemic virtual learning, Marshall said, are eGlass systems. 

They’re also partially what makes the program so pricey (in addition to the technology and infrastructure needs of districts and employee salaries). All of the equipment required for the futuristic contraptions, which the company describes as “illuminated transparent lightboards” that have a camera to monitor the classroom, costs about $3,000. 

Marshall said the lightboards are essential because they’re interactive and allow teachers to teach in real time. Leslie Hebert, one of the teachers in the program and the education program development specialist for K-12 literacy at MPB, said while the program is less hands-on, the lessons are more in-depth because of the technology.

“This is not your normal sit-and-get-lectured style of teaching,” Marshall said. “When the pandemic was here, it was really that the teachers talked and the kids listened and that was it … This is almost like having a real person in the classroom. When you couple it with a facilitator to keep kids on task, that’s a game changer.” 

Right now, the program uses two eGlass systems and offers English I, English III, Algebra I and Algebra II classes. About 150 students are involved across the five districts, but the program has the capacity for 5,400 students, six teachers and six assistants when it’s fully scaled up. 

They’ll be adding math and science classes to the program in the spring, Marshall said, and 12 more eGlass systems are on the way. The initiative started small because the agency’s appropriation wasn’t finalized until late in the summer due to legislators bickering over the state budget. 

And Evans is pushing for more resources. He said recently that he’s asking the Legislature to continue funding the program next year to expand it. 

The more students, the better, Hebert said. The program is helping her reach more students than she used to teach in a traditional classroom setting. The medium matters less. 

“At the end of the day, it’s about teaching children,” she said.

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