Los Angeles Schools Supt. David L. Brewer declares, "I am an encore," at the launch of the EnCorps Teacher Initiative, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sherry Lansing

Photo by David Bank. Copyright David Bank/Civic Ventures.

Sherry Lansing was a math teacher at Theodore Roosevelt High School on the eastside of Los Angeles before her 30-year career in the movie business, which included a dozen years as head of Paramount Pictures.

Now in her encore career as a civic leader, she returned to Roosevelt last week to launch the EnCorps Teacher Initiative, an ambitious public-private effort to recruit 2,000 professionals in the next two years to take up new careers as teachers. Lansing is on the board of directors of Civic Ventures, the sponsor of Encore.org.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Los Angeles school Supt. David L. Brewer, who joined Lansing for the Encorps launch, both said they are in their own encore careers.

Brewer, a retired Navy vice admiral who took over the nation’s second-largest school district last year, said “I am an encore, a retiree who came back."

Schwarzenegger said other baby boomers could take a page from his own book, in which he moved from bodybuilding to business to moviemaking and then into politics. "To me, each of those steps was always kind of a new experience and very refreshing," he told the Associated Press.

Schwarzenegger said 77 million baby boomers are reaching what used to be called retirement age and “they all have a need to give something back. We can use their talents to help educate the next generation of Californians.”

Encorps is a corporate-sponsored recruiting effort to try to entice aging baby boomers into teaching. It is modeled on the Transition to Teaching program launched by IBM in 2005, which includes up to $15,000 in subsidies and other corporate support for departing employees who want to take up teaching. IBM agreed to help support the California Encorps initiative with technology, curriculum and other resources.

The IBM program already has 85 members. For the California effort, Encorps has already signed up a half-dozen other companies, including Qualcomm, Edison International, Chevron, East West Bank, Ares Management, City National Bank, who are offering the same incentives.

"This is going to grow like wildfire," said Robin Willner, IBM's vice president of global community initiatives.

Lansing said Encorps, like Teach for America, would help elevate the status of teachers. Teach for America has been successful in recruiting college graduates for two-year teaching stints before they start other careers. Encorps hopes to recruit older adults for even longer teaching stints after they finish other careers. Lansing said millions of boomers “want to give back and they thing they most want to do is teach.”

Schwarzenegger and Brewer joined Lansing at Roosevelt for a tour of an 11th-grade chemistry class. Roosevelt alone, with approximately 5,500 students, has six openings for math and science teachers. California has a need for 33,000 additional math and science teachers over the next 10 years, Schwarzenegger said.

“I want to make this Encorps a model for the rest of the nation,” Schwarzenegger said.

LOS ANGELES TIMES: Making retirees' second act a class act