Seven years ago, Donille Cabanaw could not shake the feeling she needed to pivot from the 12 hour days she was working for the U.S. Postal Service when it began to interfere with her daughter starting school.
Becoming a paraprofessional at Dexter Community Schools helped her achieve a more flexible schedule and better work-like balance; then she began working toward a bachelor’s degree in education. That’s when an intriguing opportunity to level up and become a classroom teacher presented itself through Michigan’s Talent Together initiative.
Created to address Michigan’s educator shortage by removing barriers toward teacher certification, Talent Together helped Cabanaw earn her bachelor’s degree in less than two years. The state-funded initiative covered Cabanaw’s tuition to take virtual classes at Lake Superior State University while paying 80% of a starting teacher’s salary during her year-long apprenticeship alongside an experienced teacher she shared a classroom with at Wylie Elementary.
Advertisement – Continue Reading Below
Now with a fourth-grade classroom of her own students, Cabanaw said Talent Together was the break she needed: removing the financial barrier to a teacher certification while helping her gain a year’s worth of classroom experience.
“Having that job and being a parent and being a wife was not sustainable,” Cabanaw recalled. “Really, the shift happened because I wanted to do what was best for my kids.
“Having the ability to do student teaching for a whole year and still get a salary definitely took the burden off of my husband, and we were still able to be a two-income household while working toward my certification.”
Funded with approximately $79 million from the Michigan Legislature, Talent Together connects teacher candidates with 18 colleges and universities across the state. The initiative is targeted at those who already are working in local school districts and others who have always wanted to pursue a teaching degree but experienced time or financial barriers in entering the profession.
Since its establishment in 2023, Talent Together has helped 300 individuals pursue teaching degrees and participate in year-long apprenticeships, providing a debt-free path toward becoming a certified teacher. The initiative also provides a stipend to mentor teachers who share a classroom with their apprentices. By 2029, Talent Together expects to produce 1,200 certified teachers across 400 of the state’s school districts, with a current program retention rate of 82%.
Both mentors and apprentices benefit from Talent Together’s staff of educator development specialists, who provide support and feedback to participants, while apprentice teachers have access to a “success navigator” who ensures they are guided smoothly through the process of earning their degrees and certifications.
“I think all of those things together are what allow us to see someone successful come out of the program and be able to enter into their first year of teaching like (they’ve) been teaching for a while,” Talent Together Executive Director Sarena Shivers said.
The road to growing their own
A decade ago, Superintendent Naomi Norman saw potential for paraprofessionals in the Washtenaw Intermediate School District to fill the void of a diminishing pool of special education teachers in the district. The problem was these individuals, who already were dedicated to supporting teachers in local classrooms, needed help with tuition, time off of work and the ability to earn a salary while they earned a teacher certification.
“There were too many barriers in the way for them to become teachers,” she said. “That was the beginning of a seed of, ‘Why don’t we find a way, somehow, to help them get their teaching degree while they’re working for us?’”
Norman approached the Michigan Department of Education about establishing a paraprofessional-to-teacher certification program, eventually establishing a groundbreaking pipeline that allowed classroom aides to earn teaching degrees by taking evening and online classes at nearby Eastern Michigan University. The program, which is still running and funded through the district, has helped 43 paraprofessionals earn teaching jobs in Washtenaw County.
The pipeline Washtenaw County established provided a framework for all of the state’s 56 intermediate school districts to create their own “grow your own” programs by establishing a consortium via Talent Together, with Norman building initial partnerships with other superintendents who were experiencing similar teacher shortages.
In 2022, the Tennessee Department of Education announced it had been approved by the U.S. Department of Labor to establish a permanent grow your own model, becoming the first registered apprenticeship program for teaching in the country. The federal approval paved the way for Michigan and other states to follow Tennessee’s lead by tapping into their own staff to fill its vacancies, Norman said.
“The impact isn’t just that we’re filling a teacher role,” Norman said. “The impact is they’re filling a teacher role, and they already know our students, they already know our community, they already know Washtenaw County, they already know our curriculum. They’re not like a first-year teacher, they’re more like a second- or third-year teacher by the time they get started, because we have that whole year of apprenticing where they were developing all those skills and working in the classroom.”
Learning from each other
When Bilyana Zambova migrated to the U.S. from Bulgaria more than two decades ago, she had hoped to put her degree in chemical engineering to use. When that didn’t work out, Zambova got a job as a direct care worker and discovered she had a passion for working with individuals with disabilities.
Once she got married and had children, though, Zambova pivoted to pursuing a degree in computer science because it provided more flexibility for her to work from home; but the new career path proved unfulfilling.
Ultimately, Zambova returned to working with individuals with disabilities as a special education paraprofessional with East Lansing Public Schools, where she enjoyed working with children. The job led to her becoming a special education teacher after earning a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education. Talent Together cleared a path for her to earn a master’s degree in special education for autism spectrum disorder.
“I think the way that Talent Together changed things for me was knowing that I didn’t have to have the financial burden of having to keep taking out loans,” Zambova said. “I think ultimately, for many folks maybe in the same boat as me, that’s the biggest motivator. That made a significant difference in how motivated I was.”
Beyond offering a path for those who want to become teachers, Talent Together has helped school districts develop a pipeline of future educators who are interested in providing stability in their home districts.
Talent Together requires those who complete the program to teach in their home district for a minimum of five years in key shortage areas throughout the state, including early childhood education, elementary education, English as a second language, special education and secondary math and integrated sciences.
“I think that Talent Together is doing an excellent job of making sure that this is what we really want to do and (making) sure we’re in it for the long haul,” Cabanaw said.
For mentor teacher Betsy Schmidt, who partnered with Cabanaw during her year-long apprenticeship with Dexter Community Schools, the opportunity to work with a young teacher helped her examine her own motivations and practices and reinvigorate her 12 years into her career.
In addition to helping Cabanaw develop her own decision-making processes for how she would handle the classroom on her own, Schmidt noticed she and Cabanaw excelled in teaching different types of students: Cabanaw had a knack for helping with students who are excelling, while Schmidt is at her best with helping students who are struggling.
“I was like, ‘Oh, those are the harder kids for me to connect with,’ so how do we lean into that and how do we learn from each other here?” Schmidt said. “We went in really saying, ‘This is our classroom.’”
This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.
