More Male Teachers at Kimberley Park Elementary School

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.”

For the full story, go to Winston-Salem Journal

The photos are by Andrew Dye.