In the News: Careers in Education Conference at Buffalo State Featured on WKBW

The third annual Careers in Education Conference, hosted at Buffalo State University, was featured on WKBW-TV 7, as more than 200 Western New York high school students with an interest in careers in teaching came to campus to network and learn more about future vocational opportunities.

The WKBW segment, “‘I Love Working with Kids’: Western New York Students Explore Teaching Careers,” by Eileen Buckley, interviewed Wendy Paterson, dean of the School of Education, as well as local high school students.

“What we have going on here is the future,” Paterson said. “These are the folks who have expressed an interest in becoming teachers or in following careers in school personnel, such as social workers, counselors, and everybody else who’s managing community schools these days.”

New York State projects that it will need 180,000 new teachers in the next decade. The conference, sponsored and coordinated by Erie 1 BOCES, included breakout sessions on topics including STEM, special education, and English to speakers of other languages. Students also had the opportunity to network with faculty representatives and current students from Buffalo State, the University at Buffalo, Canisius University, Daemen University, Niagara University, and SUNY Erie Community College, as well as BOCES representatives from the Regional Bilingual Education Resource Network and New Visions.

Students in attendance represented 18 area school districts and expressed their desire to have careers in education.

“I’ve always been interested, because there’s such a scarcity of male teachers in the elementary level of education, and I would like to make an impact on the younger kids,” said Kyle Martin, a senior at Lakeshore Central High School. “I just hope that one day when I have my own classroom, I could be someone that they could look up to.”

Photos by Jesse Steffan-Colucci, Buffalo State photographer.