Dec. 26, 2025, 5:15 a.m. CT
A new Oklahoma law will open $5 million in state funds for programs supporting aspiring teachers.
Senate Bill 235 took effect this year to offer 50% matching funds for Grow Your Own Educator initiatives, which provide tuition or loan repayment assistance for school district employees pursuing an undergraduate teaching degree.
“These matching funds are really important because they’re going to allow the schools to market this to a wider audience, increase their pipeline, and the ultimate goal is to turn existing support staff and (paraprofessionals) and teachers’ aides into certified classroom teachers once they matriculate through this process,” the bill’s author, Sen. Adam Pugh, R-Edmond, said. “And so, there is an urgency to this for our schools.”
The Oklahoma State Department of Education opened a portal in late November for districts or their affiliated nonprofits to apply for the matching funds, Pugh said.
The Education Department was slow to launch the program in the months after the bill was signed into law in May, Pugh said, but progress started to accelerate once new state Superintendent Lindel Fields took over the agency in October.
The agency has had contact with 25 districts about the program and held meetings with the Oklahoma City Public Schools Foundation, representatives of Altus schools and Tulsa Public Schools’ Tulsa Teacher Corps program, department spokesperson Bailey Woolsey said. Seven other districts have applied, but none met the required criteria.
Once an application is approved, it should take about two to three weeks for a district to receive its funds, Woolsey said.
Pugh estimated 40 districts have some version of a Grow Your Own Educator program.
The law matches closely with the Teacher Pipeline Program at the OKCPS Foundation. President and CEO Kendra Horn said the foundation has started the process of submitting documents to apply for state Grow Your Own funds.
State funding will match half of what districts or their foundations spend for school support staff to attend state-accredited teacher preparation programs at colleges and universities.
Horn estimated the OKCPS Foundation would qualify for $80,000 to $90,000 a year in state support. That’s half the amount the foundation pays to send district paraprofessionals to the University of Central Oklahoma.
The foundation also helps program participants complete initial credits at Oklahoma City Community College and Oklahoma State University-Oklahoma City before they finish their degrees at UCO.
OKCPS Foundation program has helped 50 graduate with teaching degrees
Now in its 10th year, the OKCPS Foundation program is the “largest and most proven” of its kind in Oklahoma, Horn said.
By this spring, the program will have helped 50 classroom paraprofessionals graduate with a teaching degree, she said. Each candidate has to work as a classroom aide while completing their college credits, and they must pledge to teach in the Oklahoma City district for three years after graduation.
The foundation covers the full cost of their college tuition, fees and books. Horn said the paraprofessionals effectively double their income once they start earning a teacher’s salary.
“It’s changing their future and their kids’ future,” she said. “That’s what it’s doing. I could be really practical and talk to you about the numbers, but ultimately this is changing lives and they’re going on to change the lives of hundreds and maybe eventually thousands of kids.”
Extra funding from the state could enable the program to expand in the future, and it frees up money for the foundation to better support the current candidates, like providing them transportation to their classes, Horn said.
Along with combatting Oklahoma’s decade-long teacher shortage, the pipeline program initially was designed to bring more bilingual and racially diverse teachers into OKCPS, a district where the vast majority of students are non-white and where 46% are learning English as their non-native language. Now, it’s open to district paraprofessionals of any background, Horn said.
“I think this is the most established and successful Grow Your Own program in the state of Oklahoma right now,” she said. “I hope that more come along and that we continue to get support because education is the one thing that can determine whether or not we attract more people to this state, whether there are quality jobs and whether we all have a chance to succeed.”
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