If you walk into any prekindergarten classroom in Baltimore on a Tuesday morning, you’ll probably see the same thing: a paraprofessional stretched thin across the room, a teacher overseeing far more students than is comfortable, and a quiet tension that everyone in the building seems to have quietly accepted as normal. It’s a staffing issue that didn’t develop overnight and most likely won’t either. However, there is a gradual change in the way Baltimore and Maryland as a whole are considering the origins of their future generation of early childhood educators.
The neighborhoods themselves are increasingly the source of the solution.
As school systems struggle to fill positions that traditional recruitment just cannot, Grow Your Own programs—a term that serves as an umbrella for a wide range of locally designed teacher pipeline efforts—have been gaining traction throughout Maryland. Even though the execution is difficult, the concept is simple.
Find young people who show promise, usually current students or teaching assistants already employed in schools, and provide them with a structured, supported path to complete certification. In contrast to earlier initiatives, Baltimore has been pursuing this goal with a level of seriousness. Targeting applicants who already have ties to the communities they would serve—people who might not relocate to the suburbs if given a credential and a legitimate career path—has drawn attention to a certification program created especially to support the local teacher pipeline.
Beyond sentimental localism, this makes sense practically. Early childhood education is given top priority in Maryland’s Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a comprehensive ten-year education reform initiative that aims to provide three and four-year-olds with universal access to prekindergarten. That’s a huge growth. To actually staff those classrooms, a huge number of qualified individuals are needed. By the 2027–2028 academic year, for example, teaching assistants will need to possess an associate’s degree or a child development associate credential. Many current assistants lack that credential and may find it difficult to obtain it without significant institutional support.
Then there’s the financial issue, which is actually a retention issue disguised as something else. Between 2020 and 2024, the national cost of child care increased by 29%, surpassing the rate of general inflation. In the meantime, over the past ten years, average teacher salaries have actually decreased by about 5%. In a city like Baltimore, where living expenses have increased and child care can easily surpass $13,000 annually, the average starting salary for a teacher is approximately $46,526. This amount begins to feel less like a paycheck and more like a math problem with no clear solution. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the same system that requires people to teach young children can’t always afford to support those educators in taking care of their own.
Grow Your Own initiatives don’t directly address the salary issue. However, they do deal with a related issue: access. Due to early obstacles like high school graduation gaps, low college enrollment, and financial barriers to certification, many individuals who have the potential to be excellent teachers never make it into the pipeline. If the teacher workforce is ever to resemble the student body it serves, early interventions addressing these milestone barriers are crucial, especially for Black students and other students of color, according to research that followed Maryland public high school students for 14 years. Whether it wants to or not, Baltimore, where Black students make up a sizable majority, is at the center of that discussion.
The Blueprint is putting structural pressure on people to actually follow through, which is what gives the current moment a potentially significant but uncertain feel. Earlier this year, local school systems submitted implementation plans detailing how they would facilitate pre-K expansion. There is an accountability infrastructure now, at least in theory.
The sustainability of the funding, the stability of Annapolis’ political will, and the ability of certification programs to grow quickly enough to meet the deadline are still unknowns. Speaking with those involved in these initiatives, however, gives the impression that the urgency is genuine this time. Baltimore has previously experienced this with promising pilot programs that were never fully established. Perhaps the only difference now is that no other plan is being considered.
