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Fiorella Lazarte’s small team of bilingual educators has had high turnover for the past seven years.
“We’ve had a new teacher every single year,” Lazarte said.
When the Munger Mountain Elementary School Spanish teacher applied to the Fulbright fellowship, she didn’t expect to receive the U.S. Teaching Research Award to study ways to retain teachers on her first try.
But soon after, the third-grade Spanish teacher at Munger Mountain Elementary School did just that.
In the last ten years or so, two other Teton County educators have been awarded similar opportunities. In 2023, then-dual immersion teacher Chris Bessonette won a Fulbright to Taiwan to study bilingual education. In 2014, Libby Crews Woods was a teacher at Wilson Elementary School when she won the award to study in South America, according to the Jackson Hole News&Guide.
In January, she’ll catch a flight to Scotland where she plans to spend the first half of the year researching staff retention and bilingual education at the University of Glasgow. Lazarte has taught Spanish to elementary schoolers since 2018, a year after she moved to Jackson from her home country of Peru.
The fellowship is part of a competitive program that sends Americans abroad to teach English or conduct research.
Lazarte will be doing the latter through the U.S.–U.K. Fulbright Commission. Once abroad, she’ll dip into her experience teaching at the district’s only dual-immersion elementary school.
There are several factors that make teaching a difficult career in the Tetons, a trend Lazarte hopes her research will help her better understand.
“It’s getting harder to retain teachers and whether that is the cost of living, workload, support or maybe where they’re at personally,” Lazarte said.
Jackson isn’t alone in facing this issue, Lazarte added. But rather a reflection of a national experience that’s improved but hasn’t subsided since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
By the time she returns to Jackson, she hopes to bring back insight on ways to make her field more sustainable for new teachers in bilingual education and culturally diverse classrooms.
