Alamance County student to graduate, return home as elementary teacher

Kaitlyn Lewis is heading back to Alamance County as the kind of graduate local school leaders have been trying to produce: a homegrown student who stays, teaches and builds a career in the same community that raised her.

Lewis will graduate from Elon University on May 22 with a degree in elementary education and begin teaching full-time in Alamance County. Her path ran through all three major programs tied to Elon’s teacher pipeline: Alamance Scholars, Teaching Fellows and Teach for Alamance. She started through Alamance Scholars, spent two years at Alamance Community College and then transferred to Elon as a junior.

That route matters because Alamance Scholars was built to do more than help individual students earn degrees. Elon, Alamance Community College and the Alamance-Burlington School System announced the partnership on Jan. 28, 2021, with the goal of creating a sustainable and diverse teacher pipeline for Alamance County public schools and keeping local citizens in the classroom. Elon later said the program had launched nearly three years before Dec. 1, 2023. Candidates can enter while enrolled in ABSS or while attending ACC.

Lewis has already spent three semesters student teaching at Audrey W. Garrett Elementary School in Mebane, giving her direct experience inside the district where she plans to work. Garrett Elementary, at 3224 Old Hillsborough Road, opened in the fall of 2000 and is one of 20 K-5 schools in ABSS. Lewis said the staff and cooperating teachers have given her resources and support, and her co-teacher at Garrett is Elon alumna Meredith Barger ’18.

Her decision to teach was shaped earlier, by the educators she had growing up in Alamance County. Now she is trying to offer the same influence to younger students, including future scholars who are watching the same pipeline unfold behind her. That matters in a county where the need is still straightforward: schools need enough teachers, and they need teachers who know the community well enough to stay.

Lewis’s next step also connects to Teach for Alamance, Elon’s scholarship program for teacher-candidate graduates who enroll in the university’s Master of Education in Innovation program. The program provides full tuition remission and a small stipend, but it also requires a two-year teaching commitment in ABSS and employment by the district when recipients enter the program and while they study.

Elon’s School of Education says its teacher-preparation programs emphasize early and continuous field experiences, and the school is accredited by CAEP for 2022-2029. For Alamance County, Lewis’s return is a concrete test of whether the pipeline is doing what it promised: turning local students into local teachers who choose to come home.