FLIE (Future Leaders In Education)

The United States is currently in a state of crisis, as it has become increasingly challenging to recruit and retain high-quality educators in the public school setting. Over the last 10 years, fewer high school graduates have shown an interest in pursuing a career in education (Christensenet al.,2019). Overall, more than half of teachers voluntarily leave the profession for reasons other than retirement, which deprives students of experienced teachers in the classroom but is also an enormous expense to taxpayers by continuing to replace teachers (Sutcheret al., 2016). Attracting and retaining teachers will require strategic and consistent practices to alleviate the steady decline of longevity in teaching careers. In the next few years, the most experienced teachers will retire and leave the task of educating our students to our most novice educators. There is something to be said for having a healthy mixture of both. This consultancy project was designed to assist in early exposure to educational programs to attempt to recruit and retain our home-grown students. The recruitment and retention of public-school teachers can be significantly impacted through middle school exposure to the pre-collegiate ProTeam Program. The goals and objectives of the effective implementation of the ProTeam Program in the middle school curriculum in Richland School District Two will be the pivotal point of this executive summary.