Education
Business professionals find rewarding new full-time careers in classrooms
Kansas City Business Journal - by Morgan Chilson Contributing Writer
Media
After 20 years in the business world, many as a highly paid Sprint Corp. executive, Brian Watson shed his suit and walked into the noisy school corridors of a Shawnee Mission elementary school to teach sixth-graders.
It was a calling of the heart, Watson said, and a desire to chase something besides money.
“The longer and longer I stayed in the business world, the harder and harder time I had seeing any sort of lasting impact,” he said. “This is my fourth year of teaching. I have wanted to be here every single day.”
It’s not unusual to get calls from professionals like Watson wanting to pursue teaching careers, said Lowell Ghosey, executive director of secondary personnel at Olathe Unified School District 233. In fact, he’s seeing more of those applications come in than he did five or 10 years ago.
“In most cases, what they tell me is that straight out of high school and straight into college, one of their first thoughts was teaching,” Ghosey said. “But either because of money or what other people told them, they pursued another direction.”
A Missouri law signed in May makes it easier for people with bachelor’s degrees to become certified to teach. The law authorizes an alternative form of certification through an online program, the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence.
Kansas offers two primary paths to switching careers, Ghosey said. Alternative licensure allows a person to be hired to teach in an area, usually in a subject in which the individual already has a bachelor’s degree, such as science or music, and then go to school during evenings and summers to get a teaching certificate. A second path is to get a master’s in education, making sure that the degree program includes the necessary requirements to be licensed, he said.
David Hagan, who teaches at Olathe Northwest High School, worked for pharmaceutical companies throughout his career. Undergraduate degrees in chemistry and chemistry education gave him the ability to switch career paths. He did so a year ago, first student teaching through a Pittsburg State University program.
His enthusiasm for teaching is as strong as Watson’s, and both men said that although the tremendous drop in salaries took adjustment, their job satisfaction more than made up for the lower pay.
The real-world experiences that people like Watson and Hagan bring to the classroom are invaluable, said Vida Santone, executive director of human resources for Raytown C-2 School District.
Santone said one drawback is that career switchers usually don’t have a teaching background. “So sometimes you find that those are the folks you need to really support and help them learn how to work with students,” she said.
Mentoring programs for new teachers and regular meetings to offer support are important to making the career switch successful, Santone said.
David Stewart, associate superintendent for administrative services in the North Kansas City School District, said these professionals becoming teachers can help districts fill crucial positions. Although they may need more support initially, especially with adapting to the energy level required to work with young people all day, they bring important tools to the table.
“I think we’re very much in education kind of a closed shop,” he said. “We go to school in educational communities, come into a building, are assigned to a classroom, and we have those 25 kids, and we are very sheltered from the ‘outside’ world.”
People with professional experience outside education open those doors a little, bringing in considerations such as what’s happening in the business community, Stewart said.
“I liken it to running,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to look forward while you run when you’re going to step in a hole right in front of you. You wind up looking at your feet all the time. You don’t look down the road. These people bring a great deal of ‘down the road’ to us by their very nature.”
Santone and Stewart said they aren’t sure how the new certification law will affect their hiring of Missouri teachers. It’s a program that can be done entirely online, and that may offer challenges, Stewart said.
Mike Holden, a spokesman for the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, said that 500 people have enrolled from Missouri since the law passed in May. Although the program typically takes eight to 10 months to pass, five people already have received certification.
Like other states, Missouri showed a need for math, science and special education teachers, Holden said. Ghosey pointed out that only five physics teachers were graduated in Kansas two years ago — and Olathe hired one, capturing 20 percent of the available physics teachers.
Area education leaders offer some thoughts on making a career change to teaching
"If you hire people with good raw materials, then all the effective instructional techniques, the behavior strategies, the knowledge about the curriculum — all of that is learned."David Stewart, associate superintendent for administrative services, North Kansas City School District
"Someone could come out of a field with a high level of technical expertise, but they haven’t learned the science (of teaching), and they might not be gifted in the art. It’s hard to know until you’ve tried."
Lowell Ghosey, executive director of secondary personnel,
Olathe Unified School District 233
"You know, the day I told everybody at Sprint I was leaving, I can’t even tell you how many people came up and said: 'Oh my God, I’ve always wanted to do that.
I wish I could do that.' It was really staggering."
Brian Watson, elementary school teacher,
Shawnee Mission School District
"I get to see my kids every single night, help my fifth-grader do her homework every night, and there’s no amount of money that is worth taking for that.’
David Hagan, chemistry teacher,
Olathe Northwest High School
Morgan Chilson | Chilson is a freelance writer in the Kansas City area.
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