Educators Rising

BROOKINGS — Amid a nationwide and statewide teacher shortage that tops crisis numbers, a recent program designed to expose older students to teaching — and give them valuable memories and life experiences — is booming in Brookings.

According to advisor Jen Lacher-Starace, the Brookings middle school chapter of Educators Rising has 40 members in just its third year.
“It’s similar, I think, to FFA or FCCLA, organizations people are more familiar with,” Lacher-Starace said.

“We’re just younger. And it’s definitely in response to a national teacher shortage,for sure. And there are statistics that say that, I mean some outrageous percentage, like 60% of teachers end up teaching within 20 miles of where they grew up. So this notion that we can grow our own teachers is powerful, and we are acting on that.”

According to the most recent data from the National Conference of State Legislatures, South Dakota faces statewide teacher shortages at crisis levels in five of 17 possible areas — career and technical education, elementary education, language arts, special education and science.

According to longtime educators and administrators, jobs like special education have long been hard to fill. But statewide shortages in subjects like science, language arts and elementary education are a post-COVID-19 phenomenon, and a harbinger of a tough road ahead.

There are only two ways to get more teachers: Get them from elsewhere or grow your own. And even after a brief push from former Governor Noem and the state legislature to improve teacher pay in the state, South Dakota has settled back to near the bottom of teacher compensation in the nation.

According to the South Dakota Education Association, the average teacher salary in South Dakota was $56,328 in 2024 — 46th in the United States.

That leaves the teacher pipeline in South Dakota to breach the gap.

The students from Mickelson Middle School who were reading to kids and helping with lesson plans at Dakota Prairie last week likely aren’t aware of all that. But they were having fun as part of their new club and giving back to their community at a young age — while also getting life experiences that will redound to their benefit, regardless of whether they end up pursuing education as a career or not.

“Educators Rising is really about more than just being a teacher, and especially at the middle school level, where kids can’t really know what they’re going to grow up to do.

Some kids know they want to be teachers, but Educators Rising really gives them the opportunity just to explore the profession, and there’s so much to what we do that they’ve all found things they love,” Lacher-Starace said. “So yes, we learn about teaching, but we also have planned just recreational activities for the middle school community. We did a movie night in December, and some of them got really excited about planning teacher appreciation events.”

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The middle school chapter of Educators Rising in Brookings — there are another 20-some students participating in a high school chapter — isn’t just large and growing — it’s active, as well. They recently attended the state Educators Rising conference West River, and Lacher-Starace was blown away by the response — and efforts.

“And I said, ‘Listen, our state conference is in Spearfish. We’re gonna have to raise money for two nights in a hotel. If you want to go to the State Conference, you are going to have to enter one of the competitions.’ And I thought that would take care of that, right? I thought I’d maybe be taking five kids,” she said. “Nope. Thirty four of them ended up competing.”

The competitions at the conference are designed to help kids explore teaching as a profession — writing lesson plans, job shadowing teachers or creating interactive bulletin boards for classrooms.

“It’s like here, all the things teachers do in a day. Take a snippet of it and practice it yourself, and then it becomes competitive. By far, the most popular competition option for my kids was to write and illustrate their own children’s books,” she said. “I think I had 25 of them, either on their own or with a partner, wrote and illustrated their own children’s book.”

The ER students have done numerous activities and projects throughout the year, including a previous visit to help in classrooms at Dakota Prairie.

Lacher-Starace said even in a short day, she had older students bond with their younger proteges, to the point where she tried to send her kids back to “their” classrooms the second time.

And this time, the Educators Rising students got the chance to read aloud the children’s books they wrote and illustrated for competition to their classrooms.

Two ER students, Jenna and Kjerstin, read their book about a penguin who moves to a new school and has to try to fit in to the enraptured elementary students.

That’s the kind of experience that can make a teacher for life.

But the Educators Rising program is providing much more. The group has been able to attend learning expos at all the colleges in the state, something that has opened eyes for the kids who might be teachers one day, but still need to be students, first.

“Kids get to come to campus for the day, and they get to meet university faculty. They get to meet university students. They get to be in university classrooms. They get to tour the campus. They get to eat in the dining hall, which they love, and that has been so powerful over the last three years,” Lacher-Starace said.

“When I started this, I made an assumption that kids from Brookings knew what it meant to be a college student, because of our proximity to the campus, and so many of them didn’t. We were at Augustana, I think this was last year, and this boy was walking around campus kind of by himself, and I said to him, ‘So what do you think of the day?’ And he says,’This is what college is like? He said, ‘We get to walk around to different buildings to our classes, and there’s a Starbucks on campus, so if I don’t have class, I can hang out in the Starbucks and do my homework?’ And I said, ‘What did you think college would be like? Haven’t you ever been up to SDSU?’ and he said, ‘Only for football games,’” she said. “I feel like this program raises kids aspirations, not necessarily to be teachers, but just to see themselves as college students.

And that, for an eighth grader, is powerful.”

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As with any new organization, the Educators Rising have run into stumbling blocks along the way, particularly with fundraising to attend out-of-town events. But the children have plunged straight ahead. When they needed money to go to the state convention, they started working the concession stands at high school events.

“All of the things that my kids have done this year have been initiated by the kids, and that’s what I mean about the leadership,” Lacher-Starace said. “I think that’s one of the things that I’m most proud of, is the way that they have become leaders themselves.”

Now they could use some help fundraising for nationals in Portland, Oregon.

“Out of my 34 kids, 20 qualified for national competition, and 12 of them have already committed to going, even though it means coming up with $1,000 on their own. I mean, we’ll do some fundraising, but the school does not pay for anything for this,” Lacher-Starace said.

At nationals, the Brookings students will hear from the National Teacher of the Year.and have access to breakout sessions with teachers and college professors from all over the country.

The growth in the organization is strong statewide, as well, with 60-80 kids from South Dakota planning to attend nationals, and more than 600 members from more than 60 schools, statewide.

In Pierre this session, legislators finally passed a budget that included a 1.4 percent bump for education funding. While that’s welcome news when compared to the flat alternative, it won’t keep up with the expected 3.7 percent inflation in 2026.

Lacher-Starace hopes the money woes might be solved by the time these middle school students are college students choosing majors. But either way, she’s not betting against them, whatever they choose to do.

“The state conference, we made it a field trip. So on our drive out, we stopped at the Dignity statue. Kids had never seen that before. We went to Crazy Horse and — I booked an hour and a half. I had to pull them out of there after two hours, right?

They loved Crazy Horse. We went to Mount Rushmore, which is less impressive, but the kids — it was just awesome. Kids who’d lived here all their lives had never seen those places. Kids who are learning English as a second language, they’re taking pictures and buying souvenirs for their parents. So this has just given me opportunities to show these kids things they may never see again. You know, it’s really neat, and they’re amazing kids. I just don’t even get me started on these kids.”