Filling a role far from home

By Jim Warren - jwarren@herald-leader.com

Arnold Dacles has had to make some adjustments during his first year of teaching science at Leestown Middle School, particularly during the recent wintry weather.

"I had never seen snow before," Dacles said. "Back home we only have two seasons — wet and dry."

Home, for Dacles, is Manila, Philippines. Now, however, he is one of 16 Filipino teachers working in the Fayette County Public Schools, all recruited to teach in subject areas such as math, science and special education, where certified teachers often are hard to find.

Recruiters from the Fayette schools went to the Philippines in late 2007 to interview several dozen job applicants, all of whom had experience teaching in schools there. They ultimately selected Dacles and 15 others from that pool to teach in Lexington schools for the 2008-2009 school year.

The Filipinos arrived here late last summer and have been on the job since last August. They are working on visas, sponsored by the county schools, that will allow them to stay in the United States up to three years.

They have master's degrees and are certified to teach in Kentucky, said Fayette County School Superintendent Stu Silberman.

Recruiting foreign teachers to fill critical shortage areas has been a trend in American elementary and secondary education for about a decade. In Kentucky, the Jefferson County Public Schools have hired teachers from both the Philippines and Barbados in recent years.

Fayette County previously has hired teachers from other countries to teach foreign languages, but this is the first time the district has directly recruited a block of teachers from overseas.

Silberman says school officials took the step because Fayette County has been struggling to fill teaching slots for so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) classes. As a result, the school system sometimes had to get emergency certifications for people to teach STEM classes even though they lacked background in those subjects, he said.

Educators blame the nationwide problem on the relatively small number of prospective teachers who graduate from U.S. colleges today with training in STEM subjects. Most who have such training go into private business or industry because the pay is better.

"We've had some very serious shortage areas where we just can't find people in these particular certifications," Silberman said. "You have to be innovative to find ways of meeting these needs."

Silberman stressed that the county schools have not recruited foreign teachers when qualified people were available locally. "We weren't keeping anybody out of jobs," he said.

Other school districts that have recruited teachers from the Philippines say they generally have worked out well.

"Our experience was that they were very, very good educators," said Tim Wilhite, a spokesman for the Baldwin County, Ala., Public Schools, which signed about a dozen Filipino teachers in 2007. "If we had the need for additional teachers, and couldn't fill the positions locally, we'd consider recruiting from the Philippines again."

However, there have been some problems.

Two Filipino teachers who were working in the Baltimore City Schools committed suicide in 2007, apparently despondent over being far from their homes and loved ones.

The Roanoke, Va., Public Schools recruited six Filipino teachers in 2007, but they didn't show up on time. The schools later decided not to recruit more.

In El Paso, Texas, recruiters allegedly tricked Filipino teachers into paying fees of $10,000 each to secure jobs in Texas schools that never materialized. Federal charges, including conspiracy to smuggle aliens into the United States, were filed against several people.

Nevertheless, Filipino teachers still seek jobs in U.S. schools because salaries here typically run two or three times the levels back home. And American recruiters like Filipino teachers because the Philippines' educational system closely resembles the U.S. system.

Each of the Filipino teachers who came to Lexington paid fees of several thousand dollars to a California-based firm that worked with the Fayette schools to facilitate the recruiting process.