MILLERSVILLE, Pa. (WHTM) – $10 million in student-teacher stipends are going to be used up quick in Pennsylvania. It was a scramble for those applying for funding.

“The version of the program that we passed into last year’s budget is going to pay for about 750 teachers,” state representative Izzy Smith-Wade-El (D-Lancaster) said.

The $10 million is a good start to help alleviate the financial burden on students. However, it’s not enough to cover everyone.

“That’s going to cost $75 million,” Smith-Wade-El said.

The Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) said they received 3,000 applications for the stipend program within the first two hours of the application window on Apr. 11.

“What I heard today was that 4,500 folks applied within the first 24 hours, which shows us that the teachers are out there,” Dr. Keith Miles, the superintendent of the School District of Lancaster, said. “Maybe the challenge is financially motivated.”

Both Miles and Penn Manor’s superintendent, Dr. Phil Gale, voiced concerns.

“In the past three years, we’ve hired 100 new teachers and that’s a quarter of our staff,” Gale said.

“We normally would get about 30 applicants for a position. Now it’s about three,” Miles said.

That’s a drastic decline.

Paige Batdorf is a senior at Millersville University and a student-teacher. She believes more people would be interested in teaching if they had financial help.

“If that could be for everybody and guaranteed, that would be amazing,” Batdorf said. “I think there’d be so many more people coming up through that want to be teachers and going to school to be teachers, and we’d get great teachers coming out of this.”

She’s currently attending classes, student-teaching and working another job to keep up.

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“To go to school, to teach and then go to work, I don’t ever stop,” Batdorf said. “I’m constantly flipping my switches and going from one thing to the next and that’s really difficult.”

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