Gentlemen, Preschool Is Calling

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DON GONYEA, HOST: It's the first day of school for kids in New York City, and that means the start of the city's ambitious shift to universal preschool. To meet demand, the city has hired roughly 1,000 additional teachers. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds, but as Matt Collette reports, one group likely won't be well represented.

MATT COLLETTE, BYLINE: Men. It's time for morning meeting in Glen Peters' Pre-K classroom on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It's a scene that will repeat itself for schools and community centers across the city this week.

GLEN PETERS: Can everybody's good back to - to the edge of the rug? We're all in a really perfect circle.

COLLETTE: In this classroom, Peters is Mr. Glenn, and he's one of just a handful of men teaching Pre-K anywhere in New York City.

PETERS: Make a curve so doesn't look like we're all sitting across from each other.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I want to sit next to you.

PETERS: Jamie's sitting next to me. Aton's on my other side.

COLLETTE: This is his first year on the job. Peters got interested in teaching after he and his wife had a son of their own. When he saw a subway ad recruiting new Pre-K teachers, Peters decided to leave his 20-year acting career.

PETERS: I immediately saw the chance to be creative, the chance to be happy and to model happy behavior for little kids that are at the beginning of the educational process, and setting them up for success.

COLLETTE: Peters never really thought of himself as an outlier - at least not until earlier this summer, when he was at a resume-building session for prospective pre-K teachers.

PETERS: I knew I was the only man that attended it because they couldn't find the bathroom code for the men's bathroom. So I asked to go to the women's bathroom and somebody had to guard outside while I went to women's bathroom.

COLLETTE: Nationally, men make up only about 2 percent of early education teachers - a number that hasn't moved much in recent years.

SHERRY CLEARY: Oh, we have very, very, very, very few men.

COLLETTE: Sherry Cleary is the executive director of the Early Childhood Professional Development Institute at the City University of New York. She says this shortage is a problem because preschool students connect with male teachers in unique and important ways.

CLEARY: They love guys. They love their strength, they love that they're fun and they feel safe and trust them.

COLLETTE: Male teachers can play a particularly important role in the loves of low-income and minority boys, who often fall through the cracks as they move through school. Cleary says men stay out of the profession for a lot of reasons - with low pay and the idea that teaching young children is women's work chief among them.

CLEARY: It's hard for them to come into the field. Our society doesn't respect and honor that and so it becomes difficult.

COLLETTE: Stephen Antonelli has taught Pre-K in New York City for about 20 years. Today, he runs a Head Start center in the East Village, and he says he's run into another challenge facing male teachers - parent anxiety.

STEPHEN ANTONELLI: And you know, you can see sometimes that parents would come in and sort of say say, what's this? This guy's going to be teaching me? You have to develop a relationship with the parents so that they understand and trust you.

COLLETTE: Experts in early education agree. It's important to increase the number of men in the field, and the rollout of universal pre-k in places like New York could help. But without any proactive recruiting programs, changing the professions in his will depend on the handful of men who are already in the classroom.

PETERS: (Singing) The itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout.

COLLETTE: For NPR News, I'm Matt Collette in New York.

PETERS: I better Google those lyrics.

GONYEA: This is NPR News.

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