Foreign teachers flock to Mississippi teaching jobs
JACKSON, Miss. -- Hundreds of educators from thePhilippines , India and elsewhere from outside the U.S. are in Mississippi classrooms teaching in hard-to-fill positions and in rural areas.
Superintendents in Jackson Public Schools ,Noxubee County , Holmes County, Meridian andGulfport have all hired foreign teachers on temporary visas called H-1Bs, along with others. According to MDE, there are 451 teachers in the state with degrees from outside the country.
School officials in Noxubee County three years ago began working with an agency that helps recruit teachers from the Philippines.
The district, which is classified by the state education department as one of 48 critical shortage areas, had difficulty filling special education positions. Former Special Education Director Darlene Cole said the district also had trouble finding speech language pathologists to work with students with communicative disorders.
Cole began working with Ligaya Avenida, the CEO of California-based Avenida International Consultants Inc., an agency that helps school districts employ qualified Filipino teachers.
“I would tell her what kind of teachers I needed, and she would send me some resumes. I’d review the resumes, and then we actually — one year they actually funded one of our employees to go over there (to the Philippines) and conduct the interviews in person,” Cole described.
During other years, Cole would interview the candidates on Skype .
Once the interviews were complete and the school board approved the hires, Avenida began working on the visa process for the employees, who often pay her company a fee of about $10,000 to cover visa fees, transcripts, airfare and housing, among other expenses.
Cole, who was the special education director from 2004 to 2015, said it was only in the last few years of her career that finding teachers became such a problem that the district began looking outside the country.
“It got harder and harder to find certified teachers, and in the rural area we live in, our district supplement isn’t that much, so it doesn’t attract people to come here to this high-poverty area,” she said. “And the housing — we just don’t have the apartment complexes that other cities have … They’d rather go to Starkville , Louisville, rather than come to Macon is what I perceived.”
Macon, the county seat of Noxubee County, has around 3,100 residents. The median household income from 2009 to 2013 has been $24,338, according to the U.S. Census .
“The people we hired in special ed and for speech language pathologists are doing an excellent job. They were very thorough — they just did everything real professional and on time,” Cole recalled of the hires.Foreign teachers flock to Mississippi teaching jobs:
