- [Joe] On the next episode of "Impact."

- Just start scrolling.

- [Joe] As Montana schools navigate an unprecedented teacher shortage, we learn what Havre Public Schools are doing to grow their own.

And while pollinators are declining globally, in Montana, we're only just beginning to identify the native bees that live here.

- [Mike] It's really hard to cover a state this size to look at how many tiny little bees there are.

- [Joe] That's next on "Impact."

- [Announcer] Production of "Impact" is made possible with support from the Otto Bremer Trust, investing in people, places and opportunities in our region, online at ottobremer.org, the Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends and values of importance to Montanans, and viewers like you who are Friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

- Hello and welcome to "Impact," our series dedicated to in-depth reporting on issues important to Montanans.

I'm Joe Lesar.

For years, Montana schools have faced a staggering shortage of teachers, especially in rural and reservation areas.

The pandemic has brought new urgency and new ideas to the forefront.

Montana PBS's Stan Parker takes us to the Hi-Line where Havre High School is trying to inspire the next generation of teachers by giving them a head start on a career in the classroom.

(PA system beeping) - [Announcer] Good morning, Havre High, and happy 20 Friday everybody.

Everybody please stand for the pledge.

- [Stan] In Mandy Nitz' Havre High classroom, these students are learning what a career in education is all about.

Students like Emerald Tinsley.

- I want to be an elementary teacher.

I really enjoy working with kids, and helping kids, and I just want what I do to make an impact.

- [Stan] Through an accelerated career pathway program with MSU Northern called Teachers of Promise Pathways, she's already earning college credit towards that goal with this Education 201 class.

- So here's what I would like you to do for a few minutes.

- [Stan] Today, Emerald and her classmates are looking at all the open listings for teaching jobs in the state.

What they're finding- - There's a lot of openings on that first page, and then you'll see that you can go to page 10 and beyond, and that's just for the state of Montana.

- There's like six openings in Wayne here for an elementary teacher.

- So you wonder how they're functioning.

- [Stan] All these open positions are one blaring indicator of a teacher shortage that those in education are calling a crisis.

Schools everywhere are feeling it, including Havre High.

- For one thing, we have empty classrooms in our building and that's not because we have fewer students.

We actually have more students this year than we have in years, but we don't have the staff to fill the classrooms.

- [Stan] The writing's been on the wall for a long time, but the tough years of the pandemic pushed an already stretched education system into a full-blown crisis.

The number of jobs going unfilled has skyrocketed.

- And so a lot of teachers I think just said I just can't keep doing this, because there wasn't an a clear end in sight.

- [Stan] The education world is now in an all hands on deck effort to recruit and retain teachers.

While this is a new situation for some schools, those in rural and reservation Montana have been facing this challenge for a long time.

- All of 2016, the Hi-Line administrators were seeing the problem we believe before many others saw it is that rural America, rural Montana was in a struggle with acquiring new teachers.

- [Stan] Curtis Smeby chairs the Havre School Board and teaches at MSU Northern.

He helped put this program together and is now trying to draw up interest in other school districts.

- So when folks ask me where are the teachers of tomorrow, I often say to high school principals and superintendents, they're already in your classrooms.

You just gotta get 'em started on it.

- That's your job, it's waiting for you.

- [Stan] Havre High started offering this dual credit class in 2017 after a group of Hi-Line schools sought help from Montana's colleges and universities.

The idea expanded after the 2021 legislative session with the help of House Bill 403, known as the Grow Your Own Educator Bill.

That law created a grant to help high schools statewide link up with higher education institutions to make a seamless education pathway from high school to college.

It lets students get more college credits for free while still in high school, and once they go off to college, the state will pay up to $10,000 of their tuition if they teach for three years in a high need area.

Six high schools in the state now offer Grow Your Own opportunities, including a sizable cohort at Browning that's getting college credit through the University of Montana Western.

- We need the teachers, and we need them sooner (laughing) rather than later.

We also know that most teachers will teach within about a 50 mile radius of where they themselves graduated from high school.

So our hope is that finding Blue Ponies who will graduate from high school and then come back to remain a Blue Pony as an educator could really infuse new life into our school district and hopefully mitigate our shortage.

- [Stan] Field experience is a key part of the Grow Your Own formula.

But a few students like Emerald, have taken that a step further by actually working as paid paraprofessionals in elementary schools.

She works four days a week in a fourth grade classroom at Sunnyside Intermediate School giving students personalized attention when they need it.

- All right, we'll vote one more time.

Who wants to do popcorn reading?

- [Stan] Leading a reading intervention group, and even getting a headstart in the teacher's retirement system.

- I've gained a lot of close relationships with the students and it gives me something to look forward to every day.

I'm always super excited to come here.

- They're either gonna realize they wanna be a teacher or they're not, right?

And so why go off to college and spend four years thinking I wanna be a teacher and then realize that we're not.

- [Stan] Pax Haslem is the principal at Sunnyside.

- You're supposed to get salad with those croutons.

- [Announcer] He knows firsthand the impact of these staffing shortages.

- [Stan] What's it like trying to keep a school fully staffed in Havre, Montana?

- It's difficult.

I think, so right now I am short one special ed education teacher.

In our district, every building's short a special education teacher.

With that two paraprofessionals.

I'm probably short about five paraprofessionals right now.

And so yeah, my day is doing a lot of covering .

Right now as a principal, I average just over a day per week where I'm in the classroom.

These girls that are part of our program help out, and I can't have them cover our classroom by themselves, but they definitely help out to take away some of the stress and relief off of some of the other things.

- [Stan] They also staff an afterschool homework help program.

- That's fine, 'cause you guys wouldn't stop talking yesterday.

- [Stan] Stepping up to take the reigns when the original program manager went on maternity leave.

- You know, I kind of think ohm they're still kids, and you know, she's only 17, but her and her two colleagues Gabby and Chloe, are doing a great job at running our afterschool program with full autonomy.

- Hennessy, you're not riding the bus, right?

- [Child] No.

- And if they come here into town, that's great, but as long as they're a teacher somewhere.

Like we're growing our own, but I have no problem either about growing teachers here and if they stay in state or even if they go adventurous and travel outta state, at least we've grown another teacher.

- [Stan] The Grow Your Own model is showing promise as a pathway to prepare new teachers, but it's just one piece of the puzzle.

Pay for teachers still lags more than 30% behind other college educated professionals, a wage gap that's grown steadily over the past 10 years.

- You start to think about the paying the bills and the price of gas and the price of homes, and the price of mortgage and rent, and teacher salaries aren't keeping up with it.

- [Stan] Job related stress for teachers and principals is more than twice that of working adults, and surveys since March, 2020 show 25% to 50% of teachers and principals are thinking about leaving their jobs within the next year - Over weeks and months, if we're struggling to just cover everything, I think teachers start to feel exhausted.

- [Stan] And the pressure on educators during the controversies of the pandemic pushed the system over the edge.

- Unfortunately, this public schools often become the ground on which battles are fought, and that is not a position any educator really meant to get into when they became a teacher, but that became our reality, I think, at least for a while.

- My staff gets attacked a lot, like they don't know what they're doing, and I they do, they really, really do.

They're professionals.

- [Stan] So what will it take to make sure Montana's students can count on getting good teachers?

- You know, there's no magic bullet to this.

Not only does pay have to be better, the culture of the school, treating people well.

So there's not only one, it's many, and we've I think neglected that for many years.

So we got catch up to do.

- [Stan] Until we're caught up, job seekers like Emerald will enter a job market far different than the previous generation of teachers.

- Mrs. Nitz told us that when she was applying for her job, it was very, very competitive, and she was competing against about 40 other people for one English job at the middle school.

That's a good thing because that means there were lots of people wanting to be teachers, and now we don't have to fight like that.

- [Stan] For "Impact," I'm Stan Parker.

- The Grow Your Own Bill is just one way lawmakers sought to address the teacher shortage in the 2021 session.

Another notable law ,the Teach Act, uses state money to bump up starting salaries.

We spoke with the director of the Grow Your Own program, Angela McClain, about the various strategies the state's using to get more teachers into Montana's classrooms.

- Thank you so much for your time today.

I really appreciate you spending some time with us and with our viewers.

We just got to know the students and teachers in Havre, and it seems like at Havre High School and the Havre School District they have a very vibrant Grow Your Own program going.

I know that they also have a vibrant Grow Your Own program going in Browning, which I could have very easily done a story up in Browning as well.

But I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the Grow Your Own model has particular value for native communities.

- So year in and year out as as we have produced and studied the Montana Quality Critical Educator Shortage List, I don't think it's been lost on anyone that the number of schools that appear on that list, that our reservation schools seems very large in comparison to other rural and frontier schools across the state.

And that is something that I can tell you will find as far as you wanna go back and look at the Montana Quality Critical Educator Shortage List.

And so we know that we need to take perhaps some additional steps in our reservation communities to make sure that they have a pipeline of students that will ultimately take jobs in those communities and then ultimately stay in those communities, because there is a strong cultural tie to family.

There is a strong tie to community, and I would offer that it is truly a magnificent tool in the toolbox.

It is not the only tool that we need.

At the same time that this was materializing in the '21 legislative session, you may recall Governor Gianforte had sponsored the Montana Teach Act, which was designed to grow salaries for educators.

And right now, according to an NEA study, we can point to the fact that starting teachers in Montana are the lowest paid teachers of anywhere in the country.

And so I think that that was a really wise move by the governor.

It got traction and a lot of support early on, and I think that that's another tool in the toolbox that we can use.

The Grow Your Own educator models in Havre, at Blackfeet Community College, and now at Great Falls are entirely different.

And that's the uniqueness of what we've allowed to happen here is no one knows their students better than the folks who live in these rural communities.

And so while each of them is a Grow Your Own Montana Educator program, each of them was allowed a great deal of latitude in figuring out how best to meet the needs of their K-12 partners, and most importantly, how best to meet the needs of the students that they would serve through this program.

- What can be done to address the pay disparity?

- I think that we need to continue to advocate with lawmakers and policymakers that our future educators, we are competing with other professions for our future educators.

And I think that we need to make sure that as we go forward whether it's Grow Your Own Montana Educator, or whether it's supporting teachers to greater salaries, that we always make sure that we're elevating the profession and making sure that everyone understands the importance of talking positively about the profession if we are going to have a seamless pipeline of successful educators to meet the needs of Montana students well into the future.

- Well thank you so much.

I appreciate your time.

- Thank you so much.

- McClain says there were 35 students across the state involved in the dual credit programs last year.

While the new stats aren't in yet, she expects to see those numbers double this year.

Scientists estimate the U.S. has lost a quarter of its native bees, however, that number doesn't account for Montana, and that's because scientists in the state are still trying to figure out which bees live here.

Montana PBS's Breanna McCabe tells us why studying a small insect requires a big effort.

- This is not as simple as it looks.

- [Breanna] It's mid-July in southwest Montana's gravelly range.

- It's like fielding baseballs.

- [Breanna] Forest service employees are learning how to net bees, practicing with pebbles.

- Oh, you have to have your net open.

- You can't just hand out equipment to people, and expect them to come back with effective collections.

- Ready?

- [Breanna] They'll be swinging for specimens that could be be the first of their kind ever collected in Montana.

- It got away because you didn't flip it over.

- We are one of the least studied states in the whole U.S. - When somebody said are bees declining, do you have endangered or problems with your bee fauna?

We couldn't answer the question, 'cause we didn't even know what we had.

- Montana State University Professor Michael Ivie curates the Montana Entomology Collection, home to 2 million North American invertebrate specimens, but less than 1% were native bees.

and collections across the state showed an equally incomplete picture of our native pollinators.

- I think we had 26 counties with no records at all when we started out of 56.

And I mean that's a zero.

This is our wilderness areas.

- [Breanna] IV requested and received funding from the Department of Agriculture, which is especially interested in how bees support specialty crops, for a 15 year project to document the wild bees of Montana.

- It's really hard to cover a state this size, to look at how many tiny little bees there are.

- You see underside her belly, all that orange?

We call these flying Cheetos.

- [Breanna] Events like this Summer Bee Survey south of Sheridan have helped expand the project's reach, and proved an effective way to get a lot of samples.

- When we net collect, we can immediately pin those specimens that night, and they're in perfect condition.

- [Breanna] Researchers also put out colorful bowl traps filled with soapy water.

- The bees think it's a flower, they're attracted to the color.

The soapy water breaks the surface tension and so the bees drown.

In every bowl that you walk up to is a new opportunity to see what you got.

So it can be very exciting.

- [Breanna] Those wet samples must be strained and properly prepared for the freezer.

But all this fieldwork accounts for just a fraction of the process to getting the bees identified.

- A day of collecting effort in the field is several days of processing in the lab.

- [Breanna] Back at the museum at Montana State University's Marsh Labs, Bee Taxonomist, Casey Delphia carefully sorts and examines each bee collected to determine what it is.

- It's a big component to get them, bigger component to curate them, even bigger component to figure out what they are.

- [Breanna] It's a tedious endeavor when differences between bees can be microscopic.

- [Mike] So many of the really important ways that you can tell these apart are pretty obscure looking structures and you need to get them under a microscope, look at the underside, look at the tongue length, look at the cheeks and so on in order to tell them apart.

And so that's for something that's as big as a bumblebee.

Well the average bee is much smaller than a bumblebee, and the smallest ones are the size of a bumblebee's hind leg.

- [Breanna] And there's no guides for species in Montana.

This is the team of scientists writing them.

- I love that there's so little known.

I think it's super exciting.

The idea that we can still make all these new discoveries to me, is just awesome.

- [Breanna] When the project began in 2017, there were around 250 documented native bee species in Montana.

Since then, researchers have doubled that number, bringing into focus species like the oil collecting bee that hadn't been documented in Montana since 1938, and the state's first documentation of the sandstone mining bee, a major range expansion for the bee previously associated with Colorado.

- It's neat to discover something that you think's interesting, but then to have it actually have value for other people to think it's interesting and for other people to be able to use it.

I love bees.

They are what keep me doing science right now.

Everything about them I find interesting.

Oh, nice.

- Yeah - Very cool.

- I'm not sure- - Any guesses what it is?

- I have no clue.

(laughing) - [Breanna] Delphia says most people have improperly based their understanding of all bees on one non-native one, the honey bee.

- There's 4,000 other bees in the U.S. that are native, that are playing these important roles in pollination.

So one honeybee, 4,000 wild bees, but honeybees get 99% of all the attention.

- [Breanna] While honeybees nest in large social colonies, that's the model for only about 10% of bees worldwide.

The other 90% are solitary, Starting with a single bee emerging in the spring or summer.

- She has to find a place to make a nest, collect all the pollen and nectar on her own, lay her own eggs, and generally she never meets her offspring.

She'll die and those offspring won't develop into adults until the following year.

- [Breanna] While honey bees and another non-native bee, the alfalfa leaf cutting bee, represent the lion's share of Montana's agriculture pollinators, native bees also pollinate crops, and wild bees are the bees pollinating our wild spaces.

- [Casey] The pollinator diversity helps maintain plant diversity.

And that plant diversity helps with so many other ecosystem services that we take for granted every day, I think.

- [Breanna] That includes feeding our fauna, stabilizing stream beds, and protecting water sources.

In Montana, these natural processes happen across a variety of landscapes, and there are wild bees in all of them.

- Given that Montana is so huge, I had no clue there were so many different types of habitats.

- [Mike] Here we have this huge diversity of everything from the oak forests in the southeast corner to the wet conifer forests up to the west of Libby in the yak.

And we have the deserts in the Pryors, and we have the huge sage brush sea, we have above the tree line alpine habitats, and all of those have different communities.

- [Breanna] Existing scientific keys to identify bee species are often based on location, like whether they're found in the east or western U.S.

But Delphia found those don't work here, because in Montana we have both.

- People have never had to look more closely at the specimens or the different species to say what characters would separate them in the instance that they overlap, 'cause they don't normally overlap.

Or at least we didn't think they normally overlapped, because nobody was looking at Montana.

- [Breanna] Now a third of the way into the research project, Delphia and Ivie have raised their projections from 500 native bees species in the state, to likely more than 700, because they've even discovered some undescribed species.

And while the differences between some bees may seem minuscule, the researchers say down the road they could turn out to be colossal.

- We're to the point of just figuring out what's here.

Then there's an entire, entire lifetime of work for most of these groups to figure out what they're doing and what their actual role is.

You know, we can't pick winners and losers at the front.

I mean, someday we might be able to say, you know what that species just doesn't matter.

But we don't know which one that is yet.

- Ooh, and if you look, look at this one's face.

Look at the eyes.

You see it's green eyes.

- Yeah.

- Isn't that pretty?

When we get 'em on pins tonight, it'll be even cooler.

- [Breanna] Even though scientists still have a lot of questions, the bees they're cataloging today will inform the answers of tomorrow.

- We've made lots of interesting discoveries as of late, and I think there's just so many more on the horizon.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- [Breanna] For "Impact"- - That has to have gone in.

I mean, I saw it.

- [Breanna] I'm Breanna McCabe.

- The Wild Bees of Montana Project has already increased the number of specimens in the museum's collection from 6,000 to 90,000.

And they still have another 100,000 bees collected, and ready to be mounted, labeled and databased.

That work requires a trained taxonomist, but there are ways that you can help support native pollinators in your own backyard.

Plant a variety of flowers to provide diverse sources of nectar and pollen.

In addition to blooming plants, keep some patches of bare soil or dirt, because most of Montana's native bees are ground nesting bees.

Cavity nesting bees are drawn to plant stems and twigs.

Some will chew away a cavity, but hollow stems are also potential homes.

Experts encourage gardeners to reduce their pesticide use, especially near flowering plants.

Instead, they suggest other strategies to control pests, like row covers, handpicking, or growing plants that attract beneficial insects to your landscape.

Well, that's our time for this show.

But coming up on the next episode of "Impact" we'll look into the state's ongoing childcare crisis as pandemic error relief con end, and as Montanans continue to struggle with food security, we check in with food banks and resource centers that are thinking of legislative solutions.

Well for the entire impact team, I'm Joe Lesar, and thank you for joining us.

(relaxed music) (relaxed music continues) (relaxed music continues) - [Announcer] Production of "Impact" is made possible with support from the Otto Bremer Trust, investing in people, places and opportunities in our region, online at ottobremer.org, the Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans, and viewers like you who are friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

(bright music)