JROTC

Goochland County Public Schools implemented our first Marine Corps JROTC program 

last school year.  The program has been very successful and continues to set paramount 

standards of leadership and excellence for the students enrolled.  The JROTC curriculum 

is unique and created exclusively by the United States Marine Corp.   Likewise, JROTC 

instructors matriculate through an intense Marine Corp training program focused on 

teaching young people leadership, citizenship, personal growth and responsibility, public 

service, and career exploration. To require these men and women to complete 

professional studies courses in areas such as Classroom Management and Curriculum and 

Instruction seems to add little value to the overall impact the program and curriculum has 

on our students.  Since the JROTC curriculum and standards are created and maintained 

by the United States Marine Corp with very little to no input from state and federal 

education departments we are requesting that the Commonwealth consider removing the 

required professional studies requirements for individuals seeking a license to provide 

JROTC Instruction since they already receive training in this area instead.

SPED

Special Education teachers have both formal education and training on how to effectively 

teach, assess, and manage the needs of students with a variety of learning impairments.  

This specialized training allows these teachers to meet the various educational needs of 

exceptional learners.  However, in order for special educators to be considered highly 

qualified to teach a core subject ie. math, science, history, or English to the students on 

their caseload, the individual must also be endorsed in the corresponding subject matter.  

To add the additional endorsement the teacher must either pass the content area Praxis or 

complete additional coursework.  In some cases this requirement creates a hardship for 

the school division and it’s efforts in achieving highly qualified status for their staff. We 

would like for the Department of Education to consider changing the highly qualified 

requirements for Special Educators and allow for a general license to teach courses.

Math Specialist

The current legislation proposed to create an elementary and secondary Math Specialist 

endorsement has the potential to cause staffing issues for smaller, rural school divisions.  

Rural school divisions like Goochland would benefit more from a pool of licensed K-12 

Math Specialists due to the way the role of Math Specialists are structured in these 

divisions. Often times their focus is on multiple areas of instruction across both the 

elementary and secondary curriculum that includes direct math instruction to students, 

(especially at the secondary level), developing and maintaining the district wide math 

curriculum, and providing instructional math support to staff.   By creating two separate 

endorsements the benefit to smaller school divisions diminishes greatly along with the 

employment outlook for individuals with this elementary and secondary endorsement.

Engineering

Goochland County Public Schools are currently offering at least two engineering courses 

being taught by current Career and Technical Education teachers; at least one of them is a 

dual enrollment course being offered through James Madison University.  The purpose of 

these classes is to help expose students to engineering, while at the same time providing 

the necessary pre-requisite engineering courses.  The Commonwealth of Virginia offering 

an engineering teaching endorsement could potentially create a problem in that most Engineering teachers also teach other courses.  Whereas we have an excellent Engineering program now, we could not sustain a full time teacher without them teaching other courses.  We would be comfortable if the Tech Ed endorsement could also continue to teach engineering.  The role of secondary 

education is to expose students to a variety of interests in an effort to help the student 

identify their passions.

CTE Technical Professional Licenses

Please take a look at the technical professional license for Building Trades.  It is not feasible to find a person with the number of hours in electricity, plumbing, HVAC, and carpentry.  We would like to see a specialty in any one of these areas count toward licensure.  Literally, no person has all four.

Also, please consider a longer time period for completing the three required courses.  Since many of these professionals do not even have a college degree, taking three courses is a hardship in an area that is already difficult to recruit.  Frankly, we would like to see the option in CTE (and JROTC) to hire these indviduals based on their experience expertise and require divisions to train them in Human Growth and Development, Curriculum, Discipline, and Technology. 

We feel that CTE and JROTC licenses would be easier to recruit if we provided these skills in training rather than a required course paid by the teacher without flexible scheduling options.