IRMO, S.C. — Lexington Richland School District Five is equipping future leaders in their new partnership with the Call me MiSTER program. It's an initiative to help recruit and retain diverse male educators.
The school district's first summer internship session just wrapped up.
Call me MiSTER is a program that began at Clemson University to increase the pool of minority male teachers who plan to teach in South Carolina public schools.
Over the course of the past five weeks, six future teachers, some with ties to the Midlands, participated in a summer internship, teaching 86 LexRich Five students in the Summer Reading Camp at Harbison West Elementary School or the Summer SOAR program at Irmo Middle School.
"I'd say teacher efficacy and personal growth were two of the biggest things that I took away from the internship," Antonio Riley Jr., one of the interns said. "Being able to be a part of the literature camp, seeing the kids, their baseline goals from their previous schools and then they are giving them to us and putting it in our hands to improve their literacy skills, their reading or writing in that five week time span. It was amazing."
Riley is enrolled in the Call Me MiSTER program at USC Beaufort, where he attends college. He explains he wanted to be a part of this location's program this summer because it's close to home, northeast Columbia.
Desmon Marshall is another intern, from Newberry College.
"We had co-teachers and we read with the kids and we helped them out with their phonics and stuff," Marshall said.
Lexington Richland School District 5 camp administrator Jill Downs tells News19 the internship was very hands on.
"They modeled read alouds, they did many lessons themselves. They planned some small group and individual group lessons," Downs said.
Not to mention, the program gives these future teachers a snapshot of teaching in the Midlands, a place they could eventually work.
"Teacher recruitment has been a huge issue across the state and our goal with this program is to help interns see what it's like to be a teacher, the joys that come with it, the hardships that come with it," Downs said.
According to Lexington Richland School District Five, the district hopes to expand the program by adding more interns next summer.