The $702,820 state grant is part of $10 million in funding allocated by the Ohio General Assembly as part of the Straight A Fund that will enable Wright State University to help high school teachers qualify to teach college courses in high school. It will create nearly $500,000 in scholarships for the teachers — in which Wright State will add $162,000 — to reach a goal of 60 teachers completing their credentials.
The Department of Mathematics and Statistics has designed a Certificate Program to assist high school teachers in obtaining the credentials needed to teach dual credit courses. The grant provides tuition support for teachers, as well as course development funds. The Department of Mathematics and Statistics plans to develop a transition course to prepare teachers for the graduate courses in the certificate program which set the foundation for teaching calculus. The grant will also be used to create two additional credential programs — Music and Physics. Online versions of the programs’ graduate courses will be made more accessible to the teachers, and the physics courses will be revised to ease transition.
“Providing this funding for teacher credentialing will ultimately allow more students to take advantage of College Credit Plus, which is great news for students and families looking to save potentially thousands on the cost of a college education,” said Ohio Department of Higher Education Chancellor John Carey. Prior to the grant proposal, Wright State had identified four credential programs for high school teachers — History, Composition and Rhetoric, Mathematics and Statistics, and Earth and Environmental Sciences. Read more in the WSU Newsroom.
