Key points:
Every hiring season, school districts ask the same question: Where are the teachers? We stopped asking and started building.
Florida’s Orange County Public Schools (OCPS) is one of the largest districts in the country, and over the last several years, we’ve built what we now think of as a cradle-to-career teacher development ecosystem. This is not a singular program, but rather a set of pathways built on the idea that the people most likely to become great teachers, and stay, are already in our buildings, communities, and high schools. Our job is to find them early and clear the path between where they are and where they want to go.
The traditional teacher pipeline where students enroll in a college of education, graduate, get certified, and apply to a district is producing fewer and fewer candidates every year. We know this. Education school enrollments have been falling nationally for more than a decade, and the graduates who do enter the field often choose districts close to where they trained. For a large urban system like OCPS, that means competing for a smaller hiring pool against every other district. We also know that posting more jobs on more platforms and hiring sites wasn’t going to fix this problem.
If the traditional pipeline was narrowing, we needed to widen the path from a different direction. So, we started looking inward, at the people already in our schools who had the makings of great teachers but no clear way to get there. The added benefit, we’d come to realize, is that the people you grow tend to stay.
Meeting people where they are
Paraprofessionals are the heart of this work. They’re in our schools every day, students know them, families trust them, and they already understand the intricacies and culture of their schools. What many lack is a clear, supported path to the front of the classroom. That’s where the opportunity is to offer support.
We partnered with local higher education institutions to build two distinct pathways, because everyone thrives under different circumstances, especially when you’re returning to school as a working adult. One partner runs a small, personalized cohort with blended evening coursework, and just entered its eighth cohort. An additional partner provides a scholarship-based program that folds candidates into its larger college of education.
When we sit with a candidate, we want to build a relationship with them and get to know them as we’re trying to meet them where they can succeed. We ask: Are you a learner who’ll do well in a big university setting, or have you been out of school for 15 years and need something more guided? Do you have kids at home and no room for in-person evenings? The right program depends on who you are as a learner, as a person, and what you’re juggling while making this commitment.
For candidates who can’t leave their school at all, we built a third pathway option through a national partner: a residency model that turns on-the-job classroom work into micro-credentialed college credit. No travel to a college campus. No outside coursework. Your classroom work counts as coursework.
This summer, our first cohort in the residency model program graduates. Several will graduate and be certified in elementary education, while the majority will graduate and certify in ESE, where vacancies are consistently high. In 2024–25, 100 percent of participants received satisfactory ratings, which tells us the model holds up where it matters most: in front of students.
A new kind of intern
One of our fastest-moving programs came out of a 2023 state statute most districts were still figuring out. The paid senior intern pathway allows qualified education students to serve as teachers of record in their final semester, full-time, with pay, benefits, and FTE count, just before they graduate college. We launched a pilot in spring 2024 with 11 students, nearly all through our local university and college partners. After the initial year, we brought principals and university faculty together to collaborate; we discussed all of the program benefits and adjusted supports that were necessary. A year later, we had 14 paid senior interns in a single semester. The pathway has continued to flourish since its inception, growing a little more with each school year.
There were some questions along the way. But providing principals with an overview of the selection process and program criteria gave a clearer picture of the caliber of the intern entering the program. Some universities set GPA and testing requirements above the state’s minimums, and every candidate needed a college letter of recommendation. These were students who had already shown they were ready to teach. In several cases, they were the same candidates principals had hoped to hire mid-semester before this intern program existed.
Starting before high school ends
Looking ahead, the newest piece of our teacher ecosystem is a high school academy pathway, piloted at two of our high schools near a major university corridor. Through a dual enrollment partnership with a local college, students can complete the prerequisites for an education bachelor’s degree before they graduate, earning both their high school diploma and an associate’s degree at the same time. They leave the academy ready to enter our OCPS pathways program or any bachelor’s program in the state, with hands-on experience working with pre-K students they got without ever leaving campus.
To ensure we are reaching every student who wants to teach, we are branching out beyond the obvious candidate. We’re working with guidance counselors to find students who haven’t considered teaching yet, but who would thrive in the position. These are the students who are good with younger children, who light up in service roles, and who might not have a clear direction but have every quality you want in a teacher. From here, those students can feed into one of our pathways, and some will come back to us as paraprofessionals while they finish their degrees. Our goal is to grow educators from our own communities, so the teacher at the front of the classroom grew up in the same neighborhood as the students in the desks. We have found that teachers who come from the community they teach in tend to stay, helping retention rates.
The infrastructure nobody talks about
None of this works without solving the practical problems that doom programs before they start: funding. When a paraprofessional in a high-needs school reaches the internship phase of their education degree program, they can’t afford to take unpaid leave.
We worked with our staffing partner, Kelly Education, to arrange substitute coverage during those rotations, sending a coordinated list of names, schools, and coverage dates so that every absence was planned and covered in advance. The paraprofessional doesn’t lose a paycheck. The classroom doesn’t lose continuity — this is what ensures the program survives. Any district with a staffing partnership should be asking whether it can be structured to support teacher development, not just daily coverage.
Over time, our substitute teacher pool has become one of our most reliable recruiting grounds. We track the number of substitutes who convert into full instructional hires each year, and the numbers have been consistent: these are people who already have bachelor’s degrees, who already love what they’re doing in our classrooms, and who are ready to make it permanent. Our recruiting team meets with them individually, walks them through certification pathways, and recruits actively at substitute orientation events for our alternative certification program. They aren’t strangers to our schools; they’re already part of them.
Retention starts at the first conversation
Relationships run through everything we’ve built. Every person on our recruiting team is a former teacher. They answer the phones. They follow candidates from a college event through onboarding and into year two. We have new hires walk in and say, “I remember meeting you at a local college two years ago.” As large as OCPS is, every candidate should feel like they’re working with the smallest, most personal district they’ve ever encountered.
Our two-year induction program adds on-campus mentors at every school, weekly support resources, and stipends for mentor teachers. This structure showcases to new teachers that the district takes their success seriously.
If you’re a district just starting this work, start small. You don’t need to create five programs at once. Pick one pathway, build one university relationship, and make it work for the candidates in front of you, in your community. From there, offer more than one modality, because your candidates aren’t one type of learner. And remember: the teacher shortage isn’t only a recruiting problem; there is a retention factor, too. The district that answers the phone, follows up, and makes a candidate feel supported before they’re hired is the district they’ll want to stay in. OCPS has built multiple pathways to meet the evolving needs of future teachers.
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