After war, they say they are up to challenge
by Gil Klein
Teaching in difficult high schools is nothing to veterans returning from Iraq. After rocket-powered grenades and roadside bombs, spitballs are easy.
Michael Watts was “busting in doors” while on combat patrols near the Iranian border last year. Today, Watts, a veteran of the N.C. National Guard, teaches teenagers with discipline problems.
“They can throw their best at me and it’s not going to get me too riled up. Combat gave me the temperament to deal with troubled kids,” said Watts, 41, who teaches in Lincolnton, N.C. “Ihave the attitude now if it’s not going to kill me, it’s not that big a deal.”
Watts is one of more than 9,000 veterans – more than half of them in the South – who in the past 12 years have entered teaching through a federal program called Troops to Teachers.
The program is a favorite among schools looking for experienced teachers to fill tough jobs in urban and rural school districts. But three years into the war in Iraq, the program is struggling to find new recruits as the military stops highly trained personnel from retiring…
“They may have planned to retire, but because (they have) certain job skills, the services are keeping them for another year or two,” said John Gantz, the head of Troops to Teachers.
Reaching a peak of 1,379 in 2003, the annual number of new participants dropped to just over 1,000 last year. Many National Guardsmen and reservists don’t want to sign up because they don’t know whether they will be called up for active service, said Peter Peters, the program’s assistant chief.
“We have some school districts mad at us because we can’t supply enough teachers,” he said.
Benita Land Perry, who applied to the program while in Iraq, was finishing her Army Reserve summer training this month before heading back to Virginia Beach, Va., to teach math at Booker T. Washington High School.
“You take care of the people who are under you,” Perry said, in a cell-phone interview from her Humvee. “That’s what the military taught me and that’s how I try to relate to my students. We talk about performing the mission. No matter what’s going on in your home life, your mission now is to finish school.”
Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Texas and Virginia are among the states attracting the most veterans to the classroom.
“That’s where we have a large majority of our military bases,” Gantz said. “As career military people retire, they’re interested in locating near a base. The South is where the population growth is so that’s where we need teachers.”
The military offers the hardest to find teachers: men and minorities willing to teach science, math and special education.
The veterans, who average 42 years old when they enter the classroom, are more likely than teachers right out of college to still be educators after five years.
At a cost of nearly $15 million a year, the program helps veterans with teacher-certification requirements and job applications, and links veterans to schools with jobs. It provides a bonus of up to $10,000 for veterans willing to work in the most challenging schools.
Over the past couple of years, the Education Department has limited the number of schools that qualify for the bonuses, Peters said, which has also reduced applications.
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