Staffed Up is a monthly series examining school staffing best practices and solutions for teacher recruitment and retention.
As they look to fill the pipeline for the next generation of teachers, some education leaders in Maryland are asking: What about the students already in front of us?
For almost 15 years, Prince George’s County Public Schools has offered an intensive career and technical education program that enables high school students to earn college credits and a paraprofessional certification on the path to teaching.
The results of the program — known as the Teacher Academy of Maryland — are promising at both the district and state levels.
Over the last three school years, 75% of students who enrolled in PG County Public Schools’ TAM program have earned a paraprofessional certification, according to Connie Findley, program coordinator for TAM.
This year, about 250 students at three of the district’s more than 30 high schools are enrolled in the program, Findley said. TAM includes four CTE courses, which are each a year long. A fourth high school will begin offering TAM programming soon.
Meanwhile, a study published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in January found that high school students exposed to the TAM program were 45% more likely to become teachers within a decade of participating.
These findings are significant, because this appears to be the first time researchers have analyzed the impacts that a grow-your-own program can have on students’ likelihood of teaching later, said David Blazar, one of the study’s authors and a professor of education policy at the University of Maryland.
In PG County Public Schools, Findley said that a lot of students who complete the TAM program eventually become educators at some point in their careers — whether in the short-term or long-term. Sometimes those students even return to teach in the district, she added.
As a former PG County student herself, Findley said it was important for her to come back and teach in the district that laid her foundation.
“It’s important for us to say, ‘Let’s invest in the students that we already have in front of us,’” Findley said. “They’re expressing to us, ‘I want to be here.’ So let’s go ahead and invest back into those [students], nurture those relationships, and make sure they do come back to Prince George’s.”
TAM in action
Towson University developed PG County’s TAM curriculum, Findley said. Throughout their high school career, students must complete four courses, including:
- Human growth and development.
- Teaching as a profession.
- Foundations of curriculum and instruction.
- A final internship class where they gain instructional experience.
TAM students also go on field trips to teaching conferences and visit education programs at colleges and universities to get a glimpse of what a higher ed pathway in teaching could look like.
The district’s TAM students recently had the opportunity to use interactive teaching simulation software at Towson University known as Mursion. The partially AI-powered program allows students to immerse themselves in a digital classroom setting or a parent-teacher conference. Then, an actor on the backend of the simulation can give feedback or ask questions as students interact with it.
Meanwhile, the district’s applications for the TAM program rose 20% between the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years, according to Findley. Beyond the program’s increase in marketing strategies — such as posting flyers, debuting commercials in movie theaters or hosting open houses — Findley credits the district’s success with TAM to its teachers.
Maryland invests big in grow-your-own
Grow-your-own programs — of which TAM is one type — are also important solutions for schools to invest in as challenges with teacher shortages persist, Findley said.
“With the teacher shortage, we need more educators,” Findley said on the demand for grow-your-own program investments. “We need people who are invested in the education of students, not only on a county level, but just even within the community.”
The Maryland Department of Education reported in February that teacher vacancies statewide sharply dropped 45% between the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years, with 886 vacancies remaining this school year.
Despite significant progress to address teacher shortages in Maryland, there’s still more work to do, said Kelly Meadows, assistant state superintendent of educator effectiveness at MDOE.
Maryland's teacher vacancies are declining
Citing state data, Meadows said there were 6,067 Maryland educators — or 9.5% of the state’s teacher workforce — who had conditional teaching licenses in the 2025-26 school year.
“We not only need to get those 6,000 and some conditionally licensed teachers across the finish line and get them professionally licensed, but we also need to build a pipeline that's sustainable so that we don't have to continue to hire conditionally licensed teachers,” Meadows said.
On top of that, MDOE reported that the annual number of students completing alternative and traditional educator preparation programs in Maryland has steadily declined from 1,902 to 1,511 between the 2019-20 and 2023-24 school years. The issue in Maryland reflects a broader national trend.
“If the traditional recruitment isn’t working, then we need to change the way we’re doing things,” Meadows said.
Cue Maryland's $19.4 million grow-your-own grant program, which is set to launch in April. The grants, which were funded through the state’s Legislature, aim to help school districts build a strong teacher pipeline by recruiting and training school-based employees to become licensed teachers.
The grant applications closed this month, and 20 of Maryland’s 24 total districts applied, according to Meadows.
Meadows also credits the state’s significant investment in grow-your-own programs to the collaboration between many organizations that advocated for the funds, including the Maryland governor’s office, the state’s higher education commission, and the state teachers’ union and superintendents’ association.
While these state funds won’t directly impact grow-your-own programs like TAM that are designed for high school students, Findley said she’s hopeful TAM students can eventually benefit from the grant program as their careers progress.
For example, she said, students who graduate with a paraprofessional license could get help from their district to become a fully licensed educator as a teacher apprentice while working as a paraprofessional.
“I would love to see where this goes, but I’m very excited about what the state is doing,” Findley said.
