Allison Smith (Education); Rosemary Flores (School of Public Policy and Leadership); Monica Hernández-Johnson, Norma Marrun, Jori Beck, and Christine Clark (all Teaching and Learning) received $335,224 in funding from the Nevada department of education (NDE) Great Teaching and Learning Fund (GTLF) for their “Abriendo Caminos/Opening Pathways for Students of Color into the Teaching Profession: Giving Back to the Community through Teaching" Project.  

The Abriendo Caminos/Opening Pathways Project, focused on teacher preparation and recruiting, is designed to address Southern Nevada’s/Clark County School District’s (CCSD) teacher shortage and demographic diversity gap between students and teachers. As recently as March 2016, CCSD advertised the need to recruit an additional 700 teachers for the next school year. Further, though the CCSD student demographic is close to 50 percent Latina/Latino students alone (in addition to high numbers of other students of color), its teacher demographic remains more than 75 percent white. The Abriendo Caminos/Opening Pathways Project aims to not only increase the number of teachers to address the teacher shortage, it also aims to diversify the teacher workforce to better serve all students in Southern Nevada’s schools.