In the many budget cuts that the NC Legistlature is considering, one of the things on the table is cutting the NC Teaching Fellows Program. The program is a scholarship-loan program, providing funding for NC Students to attend college to become educators that repay the state with 4 years of service in a NC public school. 

According to the Teaching Fellows website, "Acknowledging that the quality of education in our public schools is determined by the quality of our educators, an ambitious teacher recruitment program, the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program, was enacted by the General Assembly in 1986. The mission of the program was, and continues to be, to recruit talented high school graduates into the teaching profession and to help them develop leadership qualities such as visionary thinking and risk-taking; qualities that have not, in the past, been valued in teachers. The Teaching Fellows Program challenges students to see beyond the classroom and to think about the connections of education to the quality of life and the economic survival of our state. The program has quickly become one of the most prestigious awards in North Carolina."

The Teaching Fellows program attacts the best and the brightest students to the teaching profession, not only making profession stronger and students stronger, but making our future stronger. Please ask NC Legislatures to not cut the Teaching Fellows program.