The College of Charleston will soon become the 11th college in South Carolina to embark on a program that for seven years has been increasing the horrid numbers of Black male elementary teachers in the South Carolina state system.
The “Call Me MISTER” program, which will be instituted at the College of Charleston in the fall, intends to address the grave shortage of Black males who represent less than one percent of the elementary school teachers in South Carolina.
“The primary design is to recruit, retain, develop and place African American men into teaching positions primarily at the elementary and middle school levels in South Carolina public schools,” said Dr. Roy Jones, a lecturer at Clemson University and director of the statewide Call Me MISTER program.
The program, officially founded in the fall of 2000 with its first class of misters, began as a collaboration between Clemson University and three private HBCUs -- Benedict College, Claflin University and Morris College. Since then, it has grown with the addition of South Carolina State University, five two-year colleges—Greenville Technical College, Midlands Technical College, Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College, Tri-County Technical College and Trident Technical College—and most recently the College of Charleston.
Program officials say they strategically sought out the College of Charleston to join the network.
“What became clear is that we needed another four-year college in Charleston to help develop the cluster in the Charleston area,” says Jones. “We didn’t have a four-year college at all down in the low country of South Carolina.
The line “Call Me MISTER” was made famous by Sidney Poitier in the movie In the Heat of the Night. MISTER is an acronym that stands for “Men Instructing Student Toward Effective Role Modeling.” All current and incoming fall 2007 misters will qualify for the recently developed Loan Forgiveness program administered by the South Carolina Student Loan Corporation. They also receive a combination of existing state-appropriated funding administered by Clemson and state and federal loans ranging between $5,000 and $7,500 annually. All misters in the South Carolina Student Loan Program are required to teach in a South Carolina public school in exchange for every year of financial support they received.
