Mississippi State University is reaching out to people interested in changing careers and going into teaching by offering an alternative route to licensure, and the university also is offering scholarship money to those willing to teach middle school.
MSU’s TERMS scholarships, short for Teacher Education for Rural Middle Schools, helps students out with up to $5,000 for tuition. In return, graduates must agree to teach middle school in one of the 72 designated school districts that are partnering with the program. South Pike and McComb are among the districts taking part in the program.
Dekota Cheatham, the outreach coordinator for the alternative programs at MSU, said that in addition to the TERMS program for middle school, the university offers three different programs with a choice of emphasis, for certification in upper elementary and middle school, one for high school and one for special education.
All alternate route programs lead to a state teaching license, and all three can be completed online.
“We invite students to come to campus and meet their fellow classmates and professors soon after they are admitted,” Cheatham said. “But students of the alternate route programs are never required to come to Starkville.”
Les and Julie Lawson of McComb decided to get their master’s degrees through the online alternative route program to teacher licensure offered through the Starkville university campus in exchange for teaching in Pike County.
“I think this is a great program for people in my situation,” Les Lawson said. “I couldn’t afford to go through a student teaching program. I have to keep an income coming in at home.”
Cheatham said this is a substantial amount of money up for grabs and covers a major portion of the program. Schools, too, get rewards.
“In exchange for an agreement to teach at least three years in a partner district, the student will receive a $5,000 scholarship. Our courses cost around $1,450 each, so this scholarship will cover most of the tuition for the internship phase,” Cheatham said. “In addition to the scholarship given to the student, the program also will donate around $5,000 in technology to the school that hires the newly certified teacher. The technology donation includes a laptop, printer, projector and a top-of-the-line document camera.”
The Lawsons both have different backgrounds that qualified them for the program.
Les earned a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies at MSU in December and went straight to teaching in the classroom before starting his master’s in teaching online.
Julie graduated from USM in 2002 with a degree in hospitality administration.
“I was recruited to Atlanta by Pappadeaux’s Restaurants as a manager. In Atlanta I worked in high-end apartment real estate before moving back home to Summit,” she said. She enrolled in the online program and started teaching at South Pike.
“I worked for two years teaching fourth grade at Higgins and now I teach sixth- grade math at North Pike Middle School,” she said.
In 2015 alone, the scholarship program donated more than $50,000 in technology to Mississippi school districts and provided $52,500 in scholarships to Mississippians, Cheatham said. Over the course of the grant program, MSU has donated around $250,000 in scholarships and $250,000 in technology to schools.
For more information about the program, call (662) 325-1376 or visit distance.msstate.edu.
