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When Josette Casterlow entered her freshman year at N.C. A&T in fall 2003, she thought she knew one thing for sure: She didn’t want to be a teacher.

“My mother owns a child care center here in Greensboro and I always helped out there,” she says. “After that, I thought I didn’t want to do anything to do with education.” 

Casterlow, 25, graduated from A&T in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in graphic communications, but to her surprise found herself drawn back to the child care center. “I started working more and more with children at the center who had disabilities, and I loved it,” she says.

After auditing two special education courses at A&T, she felt like she had found her calling. But her decision to pursue teaching meant that she needed to get her license, so she enrolled in a post-baccalaureate licensure program at UNCG. While she was in school, however, UNCG was awarded a five-year grant to begin Project ENRICH, which stands for Educational Network for Renewal, Innovation, Collaboration and Help. ENRICH is a federally funded program designed to recruit and train teachers in areas with frequent teacher shortages, such as special education, math and science.

ENRICH students earn an M.Ed., the same degree as students in a traditional graduate programs for educators, while also taking part in a yearlong internship, during which they spend four days a week in a classroom working with an experienced teacher. The master’s-level program is designed to be completed in 18 months.

In other, more traditional master’s programs, student-teaching is limited to two days a week over a single semester.

“Learning to teach isn’t something that happens in a university classroom,” says Christina O’Connor, who directs Project ENRICH. “It’s something that happens over time.”  

O’Connor says the setup lets students experience some of the challenges that first-time teachers inevitably face, but with someone by their side to guide them. On top of classroom experience, students attend a seminar each Friday and take classes at UNCG one or two nights a week.

The intensive program is a commitment, so students are awarded a $30,000 stipend over the course of the academic year. In exchange, ENRICH graduates are required to work at a high-need school in the Winston-Salem/Forysth County school district for three years. Job prospects for graduates are good, O’Connor says.

“We are recruiting and training teachers in the areas that the school system says they have the most need,” she says. “The participating school district is fully invested in these students and they anticipate being able to offer them employment.” 

Casterlow was chosen to participate as one of 12 students in the first Project ENRICH class that started last summer and since August has been working in Winston-Salem at Wiley Middle School, where she teaches a mix of students but focuses on working with exceptional children.

“The other day we distributed report cards and my students were showing me that their grades had improved,” Casterlow says. “I loved that because it shows me that I’ve impacted their lives.”

She will graduate in May and hopes to work as a special education teacher. “I see the things that my students struggle with in the classroom,” Casterlow says. “And that makes me just want to work harder to help them.”