Dowling has received a $400,000 appropriation from the U.S. Government to establish the Center for Minority Teacher Development and Training At Dowling College, which will operate at both the Oakdale and Brookhaven campuses. The funding was secured by Congressman Steve Israel (D-NY) and is allocated within the Fund for the Improvement of Education account in the 2003 U.S. Department of Education budget.

The Center is one of only a few in the nation dedicated exclusively to attracting minority students from disadvantaged circumstances to become teachers in under-served local school districts. The initiative addresses the systemic and growing problem of providing skilled, technologically educated teachers to meet the national shortfall of teachers in math, science, English, and computer science among economically disadvantaged communities and their public schools. Students are prepared to teach either elementary school, special education, music education, art education or secondary education with majors in biology, business, chemistry, English, French, mathematics, physics, social studies or Spanish.

The Center is supported in partnership with The Urban League of Long Island, Inc., Adelante of Suffolk County, Inc. and other organizations, which work in locally under-served school districts to identify potential students for the program.

Among the goals of this initiative is to increase the current rate of minority graduates receiving a Bachelor’s Degree in Education; reduce the dropout rate of minority students; and to educate, train and recruit more minority men into teaching of the lower grades of the public school systems on Long Island and elsewhere.

The Center works with students while they are still in middle school and high school through a program of tutoring, mentoring and support and prepares them for teacher training and education at a four-year college. As students make their way through the program, they are given more responsibility as mentors and tutors to younger students, thus beginning their training as teachers and preparing them for the next step of attending college to become college-trained minority teachers.