Fayetteville's international teachers are short-timers. How can we change that?

I have two children in elementary school and over the last two years, I have heard of three teachers, all of whom happened to be Jamaican, leaving Cumberland County Schools and going to live and work in Georgia.

I wondered about it. I also knew that the school district, like other large metros in our state, was facing a shortage of teachers. At the start of the 2023-2024 school year, the system was down 92 teacher positions with a vacancy rate of 2.8%. On Tuesday, that number was 126 positions.

International teachers are one way that school systems fill the gaps. To lose them, or any other teachers, for any reason, is a concern.

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I reached out last week to Kim Bluitt — also Jamaican and a former Cumberland County teacher, as well as a friend our family whom we met when our sons played soccer together.

“I know what that’s about,” Bluitt said to me.

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It was what I wanted to hear. She believes in straight talk.

She said colleagues she knew from her home country who taught in Cumberland County were typically sponsored to teach in the United States — this includes herself, she said.

The sponsorship is through the J-1 Exchange Visitor Visa program, which is considered a cultural exchange visa (as opposed to a work visa). The sponsorship expires after a maximum of five years, and international teachers are faced with the option of finding a work visa sponsor or returning home and waiting for two years to apply again. 

Some school districts or states will sponsor teachers through another type of visa or work permit, but Cumberland County Schools is not one of them. 

I asked Bluitt what most of the teachers she knew decided when their sponsorships were about to end.

“Do they go back home,“ I started, “Or ...“

“Georgia,” she said simply, before making clear that Georgia was certainly not the only state or school system willing to sponsor teachers under a different kind of visa.

A visa, with limitations

I looked more into the matter and was disappointed but not surprised to find the whole thing very complicated. Seems that way with everything involving immigration in our country.

Cumberland County Schools employs 482 international teachers representing 34 countries, according to Ruben Reyes, the system’s Associate Superintendent of Human Resources. Of that number, 209 are Jamaican.

The school system hires foreign teachers through contracts with the Visiting International Faculty Program and Educational Partners Inc. (EPI), it says at a CCS page, which includes links to those companies. A sentence at the top of the page notes that the system does not sponsor the teachers for visas or work permits; the word “not” is in all-caps and underlined.

Reyes said in a statement that the teachers in the J-1 Visa program are here as international partners.

“Our partners are officially recognized as cultural exchange programs by the US Department of State,” he said. “The benefits of these programs include, but are not limited to allowing students to see the world through different eyes, embodying and encouraging cultural diversity throughout school communities, fostering reciprocal learning in the classroom, and educating students on cultural awareness and global connectedness.”

But when the J-1 visas expire, teachers who want to stay in the U.S. “seek out districts or states that will sponsor international faculty via an H1-B visa,” Reyes said.

Those kinds of visas are geared to people in specialty occupations and do not have the same requirements as the visitor exchange program. The J-1 exchange visas expect a foreign-trained teacher to return to their native country and share what they learned in the U.S.

By phone, Reyes told me that if the county started offering sponsorships of the H1-B visa, it would limit its ability to offer a J-1 visa, as well as limit the system's cultural immersion programs.

International teachers are not space fillers

International teachers help Cumberland address shortages, but they are not space fillers. These teachers, many of whom are bilingual, bring an array of diverse talent and fresh cultural perspectives to a school system that includes students from 75 countries and who speak 82 languages, according to the system website.

“For districts hiring international teachers, the talent pipeline has been especially critical for hard-to-fill positions in math, science, and special education,” reports Education Week.

It is also a time when the world is more globally connected than ever. Our children are enriched and better prepared the more they interact with and learn from people originally from elsewhere.

Cumberland County, which is the state’s fifth-largest school district out of 115, is not the only one losing foreign-trained teachers to the five-year limit. Last year, an interim schools superintendent told the Charlotte school board it was losing strong, bilingual teachers even as it was trying to close an achievement gap for Hispanic students, according to Axios Charlotte.

“They understand our practices, they understand our curriculum, they’re known to the staff, so we get a culture going,” Hugh Hattabaugh told his school board, reported Axios. “And then, they can’t stay.”

'A rigorous process' to apply

Bluitt is married with two great little boys and for the last eight months has worked as a preschool director. She is studying in a master’s program to better learn the business side of the job.

She taught at E.E. Miller Elementary School and Spring Lake Middle School, where she also coached girls’ and boys’ track. Citizenship concerns did not cause her to leave Cumberland schools after six years. Instead, she told me she wanted to move into administration, having learned she had an aptitude for it.

But her path to Cumberland schools is one walked by a lot of international teachers in the system. She filled out an application through EPI.

“It’s a rigorous process of background checking, verifying qualifications, that kind of stuff,” she said. “They send your resume out to the districts that request teachers.”

Principals in those districts watch videos and review resumes, she said. “They reach out if they’re interested, and the interview is over video conference.”

EPI, at that time Bluitt applied, was placing teachers in North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida. She says she did not have a preference. She came this way because She hit it off with Shannon Booth, principal of E.E. Miller at the time, during her interview.

“We just made a connection right then,” she remembers. “I never went on another interview.” 

One in 50 teachers

A fellow church member of mine told me recently how one of the elementary schools she served was reeling from the news that a popular teacher was leaving after the school year. He happened to be Jamaican and was headed for Georgia.

In elementary schools, male teachers are typically in short supply — male teachers of color in even shorter supply — so I can imagine the effect on the school community there.

Meanwhile, reliance on foreign teachers is a trend in North Carolina that is so far going in one direction. WRAL reported in 2022 that one in 50 teachers in North Carolina are international, whereas a decade prior it was one in 200. It reported that Cumberland’s share of international teachers at the time was around one in nine.

An immigration law firm that tracks teachers who are J-1 visitors lists our state as No. 1 in hiring them, placing ahead of California.

The teachers are an investment: The North Carolina General Assembly spends $121 million on its recruitment program for international teachers. It can probably spend even more if need be, especially considering legislators voted last year to expand a program that will throw billions of taxpayers dollars into vouchers for private schools.

Georgia and other places are doing something right. But we also do not want to upset the apple cart by diminishing a J-1 cultural exchange that has enrichened our schools.

We need to figure out what is the best pathway forward if we want to keep a pipeline of the best and the brightest foreign teachers flowing in.

Opinion Editor Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.