A $3 million endowment will fund SKyTeach “indefinitely” at Western Kentucky University, said Martha Day, SKyTeach program co-director.

The current $2.4 million grant from Exxon Mobil ends Dec. 31. SKyTeach has a $2 million endowment, $1 million that was raised locally and $1 million matched by Exxon Mobil. A $3 million endowment would fit the bill for the future, Day said. Operational expenses for SKyTeach at WKU are about $150,000 a year, she said.

SKyTeach is an innovative higher education teaching program that places students with experienced “master” teachers and also places those SKyTeach students in classrooms much earlier than conventional teaching programs, said Les Pesterfield, the program’s other co-director. There are 242 students enrolled in the program at WKU.

“There are factory-created products, and there are artisan-created products,” Day said. “This is an artisan-created product.”

“These students have a passion,” Pesterfield said. “They want to teach.”

The WKU students also carry double majors, which gives them a stronger educational foundation to bring to the Kentucky classrooms, Day said. “They are very strong in their teaching fields. We hope that makes an economic difference in Kentucky, which allows us to get the next Toyota or the next GM plant or something we don’t even know about yet.”

SKyTeach is a collaboration between the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences and the Ogden College of Science and Engineering at WKU. It is modeled after the UTeach program at the University of Texas at Austin, Pesterfield said.

Starting of SKyTeach at WKU is another success story that is an outgrowth of the seven-year fundraising effort and expansion at the university. The final results of that campaign will be announced tonight at the President’s Circle Gala at the Carroll Knicely Conference Center.

The UTeach program was started in Texas in 1997, and WKU was granted one of the original dozen replication sites across the country in 2007. There are now more than 30 similar programs nationally, Pesterfield said.

“President Ransdell is very supportive of the program. WKU is the leader in providing STEM leaders for tomorrow,” Day said. STEM focuses on the science, technology, engineering and math disciplines and has been mentioned as critical to the American educational framework by President Barack Obama, Pesterfield said. Pesterfield joined SKyTeach as a program co-director in July.

The students have 120 clinical hours of teaching prior to entering a classroom, a different standard than conventional teaching programs.

“This is a very labor-intensive program,” Pesterfield said. “There is hands-on mentoring and the master teachers give feedback and guidance.”

The master teachers are David Almand, David Bell, Janice Davenport, Melissa Rudloff, Lee Ann Smith and Rico Tyler. The master teachers all have more than a decade of experience in middle and high school teaching environments, Pesterfield said.

“I not only grew conceptually, but I also was able to practice what I learned in an arena,” said Amar Patel, a new chemistry teacher at South Warren High School originally from Russellville who graduated from WKU’s SKyTeach this year.

“It teaches you not to be the typical teacher,” Patel said. Already, he said, parents of students he teaches are calling the school to say their children are enjoying his classes.

Patel had the option to become a doctor but chose teaching as his profession. Through SKyTeach, he explored teaching while he explored his medical field options while working with a Glasgow pediatrician this past summer.

His student teaching experience, also at South Warren, sealed the deal. “Student teaching was better than anything I could have imagined,” he said.

Patel is pursuing his master’s degree at WKU while working full time at South Warren.

Maddie Oldham of Bowling Green played soccer and basketball at Warren Central High School, graduating in 2007, then decided to attend Kentucky Wesleyan College in Owensboro to be a teacher.

Their approach didn’t put her in the classroom right away like SKyTeach does.

“You can only observe so many math classes,” said the new math teacher at Warren Central.

She switched to WKU and SKyTeach and was in classrooms at Bowling Green High School and Drakes Creek Middle School prior to student teaching at Greenwood High School.

She said the experience of teaching in both the county and city school districts and meeting many teachers during SKyTeach added up to recommendations when she was seeking a job after graduation.

Of course, she’s always had her eye on a teaching job at Warren Central, even when she was student teaching in Barcelona, Spain.

As a math teacher, Oldham said she was taught by SKyTeach to make a connection with her students and to build relationships.

“It’s all about the relationships,” she said.

Now, Oldham gives a few perks to students if they show their Blue and White Dragon school spirit on Fridays, and the Warren Central math teacher said her chosen career is going “really well.”