In
the Nov. 5 issue of the Winston-Salem
Journal, reporter Arika Herron writes
about male teachers at Kimberley Park Elementary Schools.
Here
is an excerpt:
Keith Snow’s fourth-grade class is not typical.
For starters, all 19 of his students are boys.
Kimberley Park Elementary School, where Snow teaches, has single-gender
classrooms for its third-, fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms.
There’s also a replica WWE Championship belt
sitting on one of the desks — a prize Snow awards each week to his top two
students to keep the boys motivated. On a drizzly Monday morning, it seems to
be working.
The students are engaged in the lesson. Some of
the boys jump out of their chairs with arms stretched high to be called on to
answer questions.
And, unlike the vast majority of
elementary-school classrooms, there’s a man teaching it.
Teaching has been — and continues to be — a
female-dominated profession, and nowhere is that more true that at the
elementary-school level.
While male teachers make up about 20 percent of
the teaching force in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, the distribution
skews toward the higher grades. Male teachers lead about 24 percent of
middle-school classrooms and over 37 percent at the high-school level.
In elementary schools, men make up just 7
percent of all teachers.
Some schools — five this year — have none.
Three-quarters of them have fewer than 10
percent.
These local trends reflect the teaching
landscape across the country, about one-quarter of all college students
enrolled in teacher preparation programs are male. That figure mirrors the
national average for working teachers, too.
Kimberley Park suffered from the same dearth of
men in its classrooms that many other elementary schools are still struggling
with. But over the summer, Principal Amber Baker hired six male teachers —
almost half of the 14 positions she had to fill. Of her 32 teachers, seven are
men.
Baker said she was intentional in her hiring,
looking for more men and more diversity to bring into her building.
“It was deliberate,” Baker said. “As a staff, we
wanted to make a concerted effort to get more males in the building.”
The
photos are by Andrew Dye.
