Tucked into a downtown Silver Spring apartment on a Friday afternoon, a group of 10 teachers talked excitedly about the experience of traveling more than 8,500 miles from home in the Philippines to Montgomery County.
The group is part of a 42-member cultural exchange cohort that was recently welcomed by the local community as it prepared to begin its next chapter—becoming Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) educators—as part of a program to help fill vacancies in special education classrooms throughout the district.
“We do believe that Montgomery [County] can help us to grow professionally and personally, where, after the program, we can share it to our Filipino students,” said Celsa Delator, one of the teachers who will be teaching at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda when classes start Aug. 26.
Fulfilling a need
The idea to bring teachers like Delator to MCPS through a cultural exchange program stemmed from April Key, the MCPS human resources development chief, who said she recognized the district’s need for more special education teachers due to the large number of vacancies during the 2023-2024 school year.
Because of budget cuts, the district was only able to hire 42 of the roughly 80 teachers it had planned to hire through the program. Despite the constraints, hiring through the program helped cut special education vacancies in half, Key said. In an Aug. 7 press briefing, Superintendent Thomas Taylor said the district had 39 special education vacancies.
“I have 42, 43 classrooms that if it were not for these teachers, they would not have a teacher,” Key said.
To set up the exchange program, Key said she reached out to California-based Foreign Cultural Exchange Consultants (FCEC), an agency she had worked with when she created a similar program in a previous district before joining MCPS.
FCEC uses a U.S. State Department program called BridgeUSA that brings teachers, students and people in other related fields from other countries to the U.S. in a cultural exchange under a J-1 visa.
FCEC President Ligaya Avenida said school districts share their staffing needs with the agency and then it finds and vets educators to participate in the program. The districts then interview the teachers and decide who to hire.
The J-1 visa allows teachers to stay for three years, with the possibility of a one- or two-year extension, according to BridgeUSA. After three to five years of sharing their culture with U.S. students, teachers return to their home country to share what they have learned, Avenida said.
For the Filipino educators who arrived in the county on July 23, the biggest motivation for participating in the program was the opportunity to exchange cultures and educational practices while helping students.
“We’re looking forward to what we came here for: to study the culture, how they teach the children, so that when we go home, we can share that to our countrymen,” said Wisamia Enciso, who will be teaching at Twinbrook Elementary School in Rockville.
Many of the educators have been teaching for 10 or more years and while they said the job isn’t always easy, they do find it to be extremely rewarding.
“For me, being a teacher is like a second mother to the students,” Enciso said. “Seeing them succeed in their life is just a fulfilling feeling.”
The FCEC’s services are free for school districts, Avenida said, but teachers must pay between roughly $8,600 and $12,500 in fees to the agency to participate in the program. Those expenses include paying visa sponsor and embassy appointment fees, the cost of international flights and personal funds.
Those fees help cover most of the teachers’ costs of coming to the U.S., while Avenida helps navigate logistics such as finding apartments and provides some training to prepare teachers for the program. Most of the teachers are living in shared apartments in the Arrive Silver Spring apartments.
The teachers also are required to use their personal funds, about $3,000 to $3,500 in total, to pay for expenses including the first two months of rent, beds, basic cookware and money for food and transportation prior to receiving their first paycheck.
Avenida and Key said the cultural exchange program enhances students’ education by allowing them to experience new cultures through veteran teachers.
“It really opens eyes for the children,” Avenida said. “They are now being taught by someone who doesn’t look like them.”
Community steps up
Like other teachers, the 42 special education teachers won’t be paid until September but receive stipends for training in the weeks leading up to the school year, Key said. They will receive the same benefits and be paid on the same salary schedule based on education and years of experience as other MCPS teachers.
And while their fees help pay for some of their basic necessities, the money doesn’t cover other costs, such as for additional furniture.
That’s where Cathy Carpela-Schulman came in.
Carpela-Schulman, also Filipino, is a community school liaison at Weller Road Elementary School in Silver Spring. Upon hearing about the arrival of the teachers, she put out a call for donations.
Kensington resident Tricia Scharnberger was one of several people who helped answer that call by requesting donations on social media.
“It makes me cry almost every morning when I go outside because I come out to bags and bags and boxes full of donated items,” said Scharnberger, who’s helped collect and distribute some of the donations after hearing about the teachers. “The community here has been amazing.”
Avenida is not surprised by the outpouring of support. She said communities that participate in the cultural exchange program often rally around the educators who come to teach in their schools. She notes that in Filipino culture, there’s an emphasis on “Bayanihan,” or helping one’s neighbor.
“The community has really risen to the occasion,” Key said. “[The teachers] are so excited to be here and have this opportunity. We keep telling them ‘We’re so glad that you’re here and willing to do this work.’ ”
The local teacher’s union, the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) also reached out to show its support for the teachers once it found out about their arrival, MCEA Vice President Danillya Wilson said in a statement.
“We’re excited to welcome them as colleagues, and we will fight to make sure that all new educators to MCPS are receiving the support they need from day one,” Wilson said.
Adjusting to Montgomery County
Since arriving, the teachers have been running errands, such as obtaining Social Security numbers, being fingerprinted by the school district and attending a welcome breakfast hosted by the teachers union.
The biggest adjustment for the teachers so far? Time zones and transportation, they said.
There’s a 12-hour time difference between Maryland and the Philippines, so for the teachers, the middle of the day in Montgomery County is the middle of the night at home.
And bus trips are longer than they’re accustomed to, Enciso said, because they’re used to having access to multiple modes of transportation to cover smaller distances. Using the public transportation system will be their primary way to get around the county, including to their jobs.
“Here, it will [take] you 30 minutes, one hour,” Enciso said. “We’re not used to that.”
Last week, the cohort went through new educator orientation and will be completing pre-service training in their assigned schools this week. The teachers said they were a little nervous about the upcoming school year but were excited to get back into the classroom.
“Teaching is not just teaching from book to their mind,” Delator said. “Teaching … enables us to form the best person, the future leaders.”
The Filipino teachers said the support from the school district, MCEA and the community is especially touching because many of them left their families in the Philippines to come to MCPS and they are grateful for the community’s generosity.
“It seems that the moment that we step into the office of the school district, this is really home,” Delator said. “Coming here is not easy. But meeting all those people makes our life easier.”