New GYO Teacher Transfer Pathway Scholarship Program Helps Nontraditional Students Enroll in Community College

January 7th, 2025

By Ines Bellina

Welcome dinner with Cohort 1 recipients, JALC leadership, and GYO-IL staff

Grow Your Own Illinois (GYO-IL) has enjoyed fruitful partnerships and collaborations with 32 universities and colleges in Illinois for the past five years. Two hundred ninety-four GYO candidates have graduated from four-year institutions and embarked on a teaching career within their regions. Despite these achievements, GYO-IL understood that there was still room for growth when it came to finding nontraditional teacher candidates. 

How could GYO-IL better attract students who accurately reflect the diversity of their respective communities? And what kind of support did those candidates need to successfully embark on a new professional path?

Liza Pappas, Executive Director of GYO-IL, thought focusing more on the role of community colleges could help answer these questions. 

“Community colleges serve both racially and economically diverse candidates within their designated districts. Both of these characteristics well align with our core values of serving diverse community-connected candidates in local areas. Historically, we have not had an overt strategy to recruit, retain, or support education students at the community college to transfer into teacher licensure programs. We are now embarking on a plan to do so.”

Cohort 1 Laptop Distribution event at JALC.

GYO-IL tapped Camino Group, a bilingual and bicultural Chicago organization that helps schools and other organizations create accessible and equitable career pathways for nontraditional students. One challenge potential GYO candidates faced was not being “transfer-ready” for four-year universities, either due to incomplete prerequisite courses or not meeting the minimum GPA requirements for education programs. For Felipe Pérez, founder of Camino Group, the community college system could help make a teaching career more accessible to the parents, paraprofessionals, and community leaders that GYO seeks to serve. 

“A focus on four-year institutions put the starting line for the path to teaching too far out of reach for the folks we were trying to reach,” Pérez explained. “Community college is the right starting point for folks with whom we're working.” 

Program recruitment event at Carbondale Middle School.

Thus, with development and implementation help from Camino Group, GYO-IL launched the Southern Illinois Teacher Transfer Pathway in 2023. After talking with current and past GYO candidates, faculty and staff at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (SIU-C), community college leadership and instructors, and other community representatives, GYO-IL created a new scholarship program for paraprofessionals and career changers who would benefit from attending John A. Logan before finishing their studies at SIU-C. 

“Liza and Felipe were excited to help us connect with more potential instructors in southern Illinois,” said Nathan D. Arnett, Assistant Provost of Academic Affairs at John A. Logan. “GYO is excellent at pulling people together and supporting their efforts. I am one voice among many who are working toward increasing the awareness of teaching as a profession and providing the opportunity to initiate the pathway of teaching.”