Million Dollar Teacher Project helps AZ teachers

Million Dollar Teacher Project was created in October of 2016. The initiative was aimed at strengthening schools around Arizona. On Arizona Horizon, we got to hear more about it from LLoyd Hopkins of Million Dollar Teacher Project.

What is the Million Dollar Teacher Project?

Million Dollar Teacher Project provides support to help teachers by recognizing them in multiple ways. That support includes providing free lunches and offering monetary support for financial hardship issues. It also facilitates partnering with businesses to offer discounts to teachers and placing teacher aides in classrooms.

Lloyd Hopkins’ Background

Hopkins is the Executive Director and Founder of Million Dollar Teacher Project, according to his biography.

Lloyd has worked in and around the education system in varied capacities. He has worked with youth offenders, dropout prevention and ran after-school recreation programs. Hopkins says he was most impacted while spending time as a teaching assistant in the Alhambra School District.  The combination of these experiences led to the creation of MDTP. Hopkins says he recognized that if we truly want to help students reach their full potential, we must have amazing educators in every classroom.

He says that Million Dollar Teacher Project focuses on increasing support for teachers inside and outside of the classroom. It works to raise the profiles of highly effective teachers, and increase teacher salaries.

The Goal of the Project

With many schools and classrooms facing teacher shortages, Million Dollar Teacher Project aims help teachers through a variety of ways. So, here’s what Hopkins had to say on the hopes of the project.

“Our goal is that we want to make teachers feel like a million dollars, to put it simply. Our mission is to elevate the teaching profession through increased support, compensation and recognition on Title One school campuses and marginalized communities.”

How are Teachers supported?

Overall, the foundation helps support teachers in three ways:

1. It helps increase the way teachers are recognized. It does this by bringing programming directly onto school campuses.
2. It brings support and resources directly into the classroom in order to help address teacher workloads while also trying to boost student achievement.
3. The program also uses integrative programming to help impact teacher compensation

If you want to learn more about the Million Dollar Teacher Project, click here.

Transcript:

Million Dollar Teacher Project