Thread: Teachers from Mexico to Help Fill Positions in Utah

Teachers from Mexico to Help Fill Positions in Utah School Districts
June 11th, 2007 @ 6:03pm
Tonya Papanikolas Reporting

Several Utah school districts have just hired a total of 12 new teachers from Mexico. The State Office of Education has been working on the plan for almost a year. This is part of an agreement Governor Huntsman made with Mexico when he visited there a couple years ago.

School districts say they're happy about it. The teachers will be filling positions that districts can't seem to staff right now. At the same time, the teachers will help a growing population of Hispanic students in the state. School districts are having a harder and harder time finding elementary school teachers, science and math teachers.

Human Resources Director for Granite School District Mike Fraser says, "Right now, as we speak, we still have 30 elementary positions to fill."

But the Granite District has just filled three of those spots with teachers from Mexico. "We think it's going to be very exciting," Fraser says. "These are very qualified teaching candidates who are proficient in English."

The Granite district was one of four school districts in Utah to send employees to Mexico where they interviewed over 50 teachers that the Mexican Consulate had pre-screened. Other districts include Salt Lake, Tooele County and Davis County. "Each school district selected three teaching candidates to bring back to Salt Lake City," Fraser says.

Most of the 12 teachers will speak English in the classroom with the exception of those hired for dual immersion programs. The Granite District says the teachers will be a great help to Spanish-speaking students and their parents, who often feel left out of their child's education. "They're very intimidated to come to the school, show up at parent-teacher consultation because of that language barrier," Fraser explains.

Mark Peterson with the Utah Office of Education says, "If the teacher happens to be teaching math or science or whatever, if they speak Spanish, it's a bonus."

The three teachers Granite hired all have at least six years of experience and one has her MBA. The state says it's glad to have that kind of quality from anywhere. Peterson says, "At the moment, Utah can use highly qualified teachers wherever we can get them from, which is why the districts are out recruiting out of state, and this is just a little further out of state than normal."

The teachers will arrive in early August. They'll make a salary of around $35,000, compared to about $12,000 in Mexico. The state is helping the teachers get a temporary work visa which would allow them to stay here up to three years


http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=1333827

Send your illegals to Utah they love um.

Waukegan sends administrators to Spain on junkets to find teachers. I have many a tale where they can barely speak English -the students are really getting a bilingual education?!

What are these teachers going to teach? American history or Mexican history? Are they going to teach them that America really belongs to Mexico? I don't like it! The tax payers are being ripped off again! My daughter is teacher in Southern California and she says there are too many teachers, that is too many teachers and not enough jobs for teachers who can't speak spanish. So now we go to Mexico to hire teachers to educate the illegals in their own language in our American school system??

Originally Posted by Jrhino

Send your illegals to Utah they love um.

Heck with that...I live in Utah.

Originally Posted by Cindy

Originally Posted by Jrhino

Send your illegals to Utah they love um.

Heck with that...I live in Utah.

Cindy, I don't blame you...You have a beautiful state, I would hate to see it ruined like my state of California. I want the illegals out of all the states!

Originally Posted by Jrhino

Send your illegals to Utah they love um.

I can tell you Jr that isn't the case. We do NOT love them here anymore than anywhere else.
The reason Gov. Huntsman has done is this is because Utah's teachers get some of the worst pay in the country. On top of that, rarely do Utah school districts provide enough resources for the kids. Many times, the teachers are having to pay for basic school supplies out of their own money. Now how wrong is that?
Gov huntsman is just as big of loser as gov richardson from NM.
This article also states: "...they are happy."
Who is happy? the county? Because now they can pay lower wages?
If you read many of the posts up on KSL for this article, I would say that many people AREN'T happy with this decision.

But I guess teaching is now one of those jobs we don't want to do anymore.

"These are very qualified teaching candidates who are proficient in English."

If my kids were in those schools I would want to hear just how "proficient" these teachers really are. Often, people are called bilingual if they speak Spanish as a first language and extremely broken English, with the words in the wrong order (for a proper English sentence), using the wrong tense, and/or referring to males as "she" or vice versa. ("Asked your mother if he want buy tacos from my mom" is one I heard from a neighbor today who has been in school here for the last 5 years - and "asked" would be pronounced ask-ed like ask Ed not like we would pronounce it if saying "he asked". Now I have to explain again and again to my kid that "ask-ed is not a word when pronounced that way and the correct way to say that would have been...) I wouldn't care what subject they were teaching, I would NOT let my child "learn" from a broken-English speaker. I know the teachers here in Tucson don't take points off for writing like that, but I sure wouldn't want my kid hearing it every day, or they would be speaking (and writing) like that before you know it, as children tend to immitate what they hear, especially if it's from a teacher (or a parent obviously). I've spoken to college graduates who still speak broken English, (after getting their entire education from grade school through college in America) and as long as they get the point across, it's ignored and accepted, or people think it's "cute".

Utah's teachers get some of the worst pay in the country.

I hear you on that one! A friend of mine works in a Houston area school, and they had one teacher and two student teacher from Utah. The teach says she was glad to get decent money for what she does. BTW, average starting pay is $33,000. Some of the states larger districts start new teachers at $41,000!! But Texas has been going to get teachers from all over the place, as well.

It was either Texas or New Mexico who just did the same thing, I just read about it not long ago.
There is nothing sacred anymore, not even our childrens education.