The Kansas Legislature agreed to pay education nonprofit Teach For America more than $500,000 this year for a pilot program to recruit 12 teachers to the state.
But the national organization only recruited three teachers for the state in 2018. All of them were placed in Kansas City, Kan., where the local school district pays their salaries and benefits on top of another $3,000 per teacher per year to Teach For America.
Meanwhile, the state is still on the hook to pay the nonprofit $270,000 for training and recruiting teachers with no guarantee they will work in Kansas schools.
Mischel Miller, director of teacher licensure and accreditation at the Kansas State Department of Education, said the contract was intended to help fill a teacher shortage in the state.
Our intention, Miller said in an interview, is that those dollars would be used for Kansas teachers.
Yet the Kansas City, Kansas school district says it only hired three Teach For America instructors this year. Two other recruits started teaching in the district last year before Kansas hired the organization.
The state education department says Teach For America told the department it recruited all five of those teachers this year. The department is currently drafting a $270,000 contract to pay the organization.
A budget document from the Kansas Legislative Research Department dated Oct. 10 states, Teachers will be paid a salary of $36,000. But that money actually goes just to recruiting, training and placing each teacher.
That totals $180,000 from the state for recruiting five teachers, plus $80,000 to pay for the salary, benefits and travel expenses of a recruiter and $10,000 for one day of professional development. The rest of the money appropriated during the legislative session, totaling $250,000, will go back to the states general fund to be appropriated for the next fiscal year.
Such funding arrangements with the group are common across the country. Tax filings show that Teach For America received $45.2 million in government grants in fiscal year 2016, about 16.6 percent of its revenue. States such as Texas, Arkansas and Missouri have also appropriated education funds for the nonprofit.
At a meeting of the Legislative Budget Committee on Wednesday in Topeka, state lawmakers expressed disappointment in the low number of recruits and the fact that the program only placed teachers in the far eastern corner of Kansas.
Thats the best they can do so far? asked committee chair Sen. Carolyn McGinn, who represents a district in south-central Kansas. I dont recall during that appropriation process that we said, Just stay in the Kansas City area.
In an interview, Teach For America Kansas City executive director Chris Rosson said the organization had originally presented its pilot as an extension of its program in Kansas City, Missouri, with the opportunity for us to explore the possibility of looking westward, but with clearly no direct promises.
Rosson said his organization planned to encourage teachers to become more familiar with other parts of Kansas. Events like an alumni reunion in Lawrence and a trip to western Kansas are scheduled for upcoming months.
But the money hasnt been allocated yet, and will not come out of the training and recruiting budget that the state has agreed to pay this year.
