Early education center working to address the teacher shortage
Back to school can be stressful. Just ask Tori Allison, a former early childhood education teacher. “The education field is always changing. We’re learning new things, like, years ago, we didn’t know how important social and emotional development was,” said Tori Allison, who has a background in early childhood education.
Struggling to build her life, while also achieving her career goals, Allison says she found herself stuck between a rock and a hard place.
“I didn’t want to burden my family with having to pay loans when I was worrying about paying a mortgage and having car payments and raising a child and having animals,” said Allison.
With the help of the Community Progress Council’s Tuition Reimbursement Program, Allison, who at the time was working as an Early Head Start teacher, was offered the chance to continue her education.
“With obtaining my bachelor’s degree, they had positions available for me to grow. So, right now, I am a PBIS coach, so I am helping teachers in their classrooms support the social and emotional development of the children,” she said.
“We’ve done a lot of work here to provide a living wage to folks and identify experience and identify education as opportunities to more increase that wage that we can give them,” said Luisa Olivo-Wolf, the assistant chief program officer at CPC.
