For Jayne Beale, Virginia Commonwealth University’s teacher residency program was difficult — but also life-changing.
At first, Beale was intimidated by her mentor — but said the constant feedback she received from her helped build confidence in the classroom and prepare her to be a school leader.
As part of the program’s model, residents are paired with a classroom teacher that they work alongside for an entire year.
“She was critiquing everything that I was doing, in a good way,” Beale said.
The program has been expanding since its inception in 2011 to serve more educators and school leaders, as well as school districts.
But the decision of President Donald Trump’s administration to terminate a significant federal grant for the program last month has made further expansion plans uncertain.
However, a federal judge in Maryland has ordered the U.S. Department of Education to temporarily reinstate grants for teacher preparation programs the administration terminated — including Richmond’s.
In an opinion released Monday evening, the judge ordered the grants to be reinstated within five business days.
RTR, Virginia Commonwealth University’s program — formerly known as the Richmond Teacher Residency — has been a longtime member of both the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the National Center for Teacher Residencies, the two national plaintiff organizations who filed the lawsuit on March 3.
The groups argued the Trump administration violated administrative procedure by suddenly terminating multiyear grants that’d already been approved under the previous administration. Former President Joe Biden’s administration prioritized increasing teacher diversity and promotion of educational equity for underserved students, among other priorities.
Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy, AACTE president, said the Trump administration bypassed the legal process for setting new grant priorities before sending out termination letters last month.
“So this administration can’t say, ‘Oh, we just changed our priorities, that’s it,'” Holcomb-McCoy said.
The judge’s order states that the Education Department shall not terminate any Teacher Quality Partnership, Supporting Effective Educator Development or Teacher and School Leader grant award in a manner that “the court has determined is likely unlawful as violative of the Administrative Procedure Act.”
The NCTR was awarded a $6.3 million SEED grant in 2022 and is in its third and final grant year, according to CEO Kathlene Campbell. As part of the grant, Campbell said they were building a sustainability tool to help make teacher residency programs more efficient.
“The irony of that is not lost on me,” Campbell said. “I just hope we can all come to an agreement that there's national and local teaching shortages in this country, and that children and families deserve to have well-prepared teachers who are addressing these shortage areas.”
The group received a termination letter in early February, along with dozens of other educator preparatory programs doing similar work.
VCU’s teacher residency program is one of 13 subgrantees of the NCTR SEED grant. As part of this effort, RTR focused on expanding the number of preschool educators in its pipeline.
According to spokesperson David Oglethorpe, VCU was still owed under $10,000 of this grant before it was terminated.
The university was also awarded a TQP grant of up to $8.6 million in 2024 to further expand its educator and school leader residencies to rural and geographically isolated school districts. The school has only received about $200,000 from the grant so far, according to Oglethorpe.
On Feb. 7, VCU received a letter of termination for the grant, which stated that Department of Education grants “do not support programs or organizations that promote or take part in diversity, equity and inclusion (‘DEI’) initiatives” — but did not give a specific reason for the termination.
RTR director Kim McKnight told VPM News that if the TQP grant isn’t reinstated, the jobs of up to 11 staff members could be terminated. Additionally, she said they’d have to cut the number of residencies offered this year.
“This was very much unexpected,” McKnight said. “We're trying to just really figure out how to sustain this work.”
The grant would help pay for program staff, but it would also fund stipends for residents to help offset their cost of living while participating in the yearlong residency.
In an appeal letter to the Department of Education dated March 5, McKnight wrote that the termination came “without cause or warning.”
She said the grant was awarded because the proposal met the priorities provided at the time the grant was completed. That included increasing educator diversity, supporting a diverse workforce and promoting equity in student access to educational resources and opportunities.
“RTR respectfully requests the opportunity to adjust its proposal to meet the goals and priorities of the current Administration,” the appeal letter concludes. “RTR is a proven investment; it prepares and supports the educators entrusted to nurture the next generation.”
As part of its original TQP grant proposal, VCU cited research that found having a Black teacher for one year in elementary school raised long-term educational attainment for Black male students, especially those from low-income households.
“RTR has a strong history of increasing the number of diverse educators we prepare,” the proposal states. “Residents of color were only 20% of our first cohort of residents in 2011” but different recruitment strategies “resulted in the doubling of the percentage of Black residents from 20% to over 40% each year since 2014.”
The proposal also mentioned plans to partner with Virginia Union University “to develop a pipeline of candidates” for the program “that reflect the demographics of the student populations that we serve.”
‘An amazing impact’
Christal Corey, a science teacher with Richmond Public Schools, said that during her residency with VCU in 2014, her RTR mentor would point out her blind spots: paying more attention to certain kids in class, or calling more on boys than girls.
She said her mentor also encouraged her to make positive, not just negative, phone calls home to parents to help build better relationships with them.
“I learned a lot that first year,” Corey said.
Now, Corey has been teaching in RPS for a decade and plans to remain in the district. While the RTR program is designed to help recruit more teachers into the profession, it’s also about building teacher retention.
Sydney Lily said her RTR residency experience in a kindergarten classroom made her want to keep teaching this age group — after she’d decided while previously working as a substitute teacher that the age group wasn’t for her.
Lily has been at Ettrick Elementary, the same Chesterfield County school where she completed her residency, since 2017.
“I think RTR has just had an amazing impact on Ettrick as a whole,” Lily said.
Kim McKnight, the program’s director, said over half of Ettrick’s staff have been or are currently involved with the program, and said staff retention has gone up in recent years.
Without the program, RPS science teacher Matthew Wester said he thinks he would have left the teaching profession.
“I think I would have stagnated and stopped developing as a professional educator, maybe gotten bored and left the profession,” Wester said. “But now this is year 15 [of teaching] for me.”
Wester already had his master’s degree when he got involved — so he served as a mentor. He said the experience of mentoring seven residents reinvigorated how he approaches working with students; he said he was inspired to do more interactive learning activities, like taking his kids to the James River to learn about water quality.
“It’s always one of the highlights of the year,” Wester said. “I've been able to actually not only get students to a public park, but actually get them out on canoes on the water. And for many of my biology students, that is their very first time having that experience.”
He said while there are not a lot of issues that nearly everyone agrees with, the teacher shortage is one of them.
“It's a program that addresses a need that’s not political,” Wester said. “It is just very frustrating that because they are working to serve a community that is traditionally underserved, they happen to get targeted by these politically-motivated moves.”
