Project CYCLE team members (left to right) Cindy Hendricks, Lessie Cochran and Ellen Williams, all in the College of Education and Human Development, discuss the program to help mid-career adults become special education teachers.

Project CYCLE putting new teachers in special education classrooms

David Manley had a degree, and a job, in human resources, but two years ago, at age 33, he was ready for something different.

“I’d always wanted to become a teacher, and during that time, I just felt it was time for a change,” the University of Findlay graduate said.

That change came in the form of Project CYCLE (Changing Your Career Line to Education), a program that trained Manley to become a special education teacher—his current job at Scott High School in Toledo.

He was one of 26 working adults, each with a bachelor’s degree in other fields, who have completed the first two-year project. In August, all 26 received master’s degrees in education from BGSU.

Selected from among roughly 300 prospective participants who attended preliminary informational meetings, they came to the University from business, factory and social work, even the ministry and the mortuary, and have emerged as licensed teachers in Wood County and Sandusky schools, as well as in Toledo.

The Ohio Department of Education funded the project—one of 11 of its kind in the state—with $190,000 in grant money over two years. Grant awardees were Lessie Cochran, Cindy Hendricks and Ellen Williams in the College of Education and Human Development. The main idea was, and is, with a second two-year program in progress now, to address a shortage of special education teachers in Ohio and to diversify the teaching force in the process.

In addition to training more teachers, the first round of Project CYCLE has met the latter goal with “a broad definition of diversity,” said Cochran, School of Intervention Services. Not only are 21 of the first 26 graduates either African-American, Hispanic or Asian-American, but six are men and the group members’ ages range from the 20s to the 60s.

They entered the project in summer 2002 with a common desire to change careers to education, a field with which some were already affiliated as substitute teachers or coaches. They had also met requirements for having an undergraduate degree—with a grade point average of at least 2.5—demonstrated writing skills, and an acknowledgement by the partnering schools that they would hire the participants and provide a mentoring program for them as beginning teachers.

“The first summer we started, we hit them pretty intensively with five courses,” Cochran said. Classes were held four evenings per week so the students could keep their day jobs.

During the 2002-03 academic year, the students took two classes two nights a week in Toledo. At the same time, under a conditional teaching permit, they were placed in classrooms during the day to begin teaching with the help of mentors. Manley, for instance, taught special education classes at Libbey High School and Spring Elementary School in Toledo during his two years in the project.

“All through the schoolwork, the majority of them were teaching full time,” said Hendricks, School of Teaching and Learning.

After teaching with conditional permits the first year, the nontraditional students worked with alternative education licenses last fall. All graduated with a reading endorsement—requirements included attendance at a Summer Literacy Institute in 2003—and most have now qualified for the next step in licensure, as provisional “intervention specialists.”

Of the 26, 23 are now full-time teachers in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade—most of them in Toledo—while others are substitutes. And the hope is that the voluntary mid-career change will help enhance their commitment to teaching at a time of increasing enrollment in special education statewide.

Some have given up higher-paying jobs to pursue their new teaching careers. Because the change is their personal decision, it is expected to contribute to their higher rate of retention as education professionals, noted Williams, School of Intervention Services. Because they’re older, added Cochran, many also have established roots in their community.

Since most have families of their own, they also haven’t had as much concern with classroom discipline as their younger colleagues typically do, said Hendricks. The older teachers’ concerns have centered more on things like classroom supplies and equipment, she said.

For his part, Manley said he went into the classroom without any particular worries. “I guess I was just excited to be teaching,” he said. “Once we started, it just fell into place.”

Also an assistant football coach at Libbey, he is one of three members of the first CYCLE group who have begun taking doctoral classes in leadership and policy studies at BGSU. “I would just like to go on and finish up the last rung of the ladder,” he said, referring to a Ph.D. and expressing interest in getting into school administration eventually.

Manley is also among the first graduates who are helping support the second group of project participants, most of whom are from Hancock County. Project CYCLE II, which began last spring semester, is among only three continuations of the program that have been funded by the state based on success of the first round, the directors said.

“It was demanding, but it was probably the best experience I ever could have had,” Manley said.