Career Advice

Teacher Sought for School in Exotic Guantanamo Bay

By Ross Brenneman — June 27, 2014 1 min read
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Sunny, highly guarded beaches await the teacher who lands this prime opportunity: The U.S. Department of Defense needs a substitute teacher for the school at its naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The position requires the applicant to perform all the responsibilities of a regular teacher, of course, but with the added benefit of being within a stone’s throw of one of America’s biggest foreign policy headaches.

The listing requires you to live within “commuting distance” from the base—Florida?—and that you be able to handle everything from Pre-K to high school seniors. (OK, the commuting distance item implies you already live on the base.) It pays anywhere between $50-100 daily.

Your future students can be a particularly tricky segment of the population. Military children are the most mobile group of students, and numerous studies show student mobility diminishes engagement. Military families also tend to struggle for resources, especially for students with special needs. Yet a 2009 study by the National Center for Education Statistics also found schools operating under the Defense Department to have one of the smallest achievement gaps when compared to state school systems, and results from the National Assessment of Education Progress show the schools also rank above average in student achievement.

One of the biggest areas of difficulty is likely the social-emotional support for military children living in possibly turbulent family situations—but if you’re already on a naval base, you’re probably well aware of that. Military children have been a special focus for first lady Michelle Obama and second lady Jill Biden, who launched the Joining Forces initiative in 2011 to draw attention to the needs of military families and develop ways of offering them support.

If you’re not in Cuba and yet also looking for a new position, you can always check out TopSchoolJobs.

H/T: Washington Post

Image: Adventure awaits! Credit: U.S. Government/Wikipedia

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A version of this news article first appeared in the Teaching Now blog.