HOT SPRINGS — A statewide program to encourage students to consider teaching as a career, Educators Rising SD, now has a chapter at the Hot Springs school. Three seniors who have been active in the program initiated by Superintendent Dr. Kyley Cumbow are planning on getting education degrees, she said.
And one freshman, Victoria Davis, recently went to the State Conference held at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, which brought more than 300 student attendees from across the state, at no cost to the students, the largest such gathering to date.
“It was amazing,” Davis enthused, citing both the two break-out sessions she attended — “managing behaviors in the classroom, leading in the classroom” — and the keynote speaker, “Lieutenant Paul, who was a teacher and in the Army at the same.”
Davis, whose mother is a teacher in the Hot Springs elementary school, is also participating in the program’s paid classroom experience; she will complete 30 hours assisting in a classroom and receive a $500 stipend for her work. She is one of 267 students across the state participating in such an experience.
“I’ve known for a little while that I wanted to be a teacher,” she said, calling her mother Carrie Deer “a role model.” But she hoped others, who might “not really know if they want to be a teacher” would engage with the Educators Rising program, which would show them all the options in education, such as “early education, middle school, high school.”
The $500 stipend could be “a motivator — try it a little, get the money and decided if you might want to be a teacher.”
“In my first year, we hired three Hot Springs graduates, welcomed them back as teachers,” Dr. Cumbow said. “Wouldn’t it be neat” if the three 2026 graduates going to get education degrees returned as teachers.
“If we do not have a teacher’s pipeline,” South Dakota is likely to suffer a severe teacher shortage, Dr. Cumbow noted. Educators Rising SD was started by Travis Lape, whose dream was that his State does not have a teacher shortage, she said. It is part of a national Educators Rising network.
The paid “hands-on [classroom] opportunity is a real opportunity as we grow our own future teachers right here in South Dakota,” says the group’s website.
Davis moved to Hot Springs in the first grade.