It’s early afternoon in Juliana Santos’ fourth-grade class in Framingham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. Today, her Portuguese immersion students at Potter Road Elementary School are learning about similes and metaphors.

“Examples are ‘busy as a bee’ and ‘sparkle like a diamond,’” she tells the class in Portuguese. “In English, you use the words ‘as’ and ‘like’ to do this.”

Santos has been a teacher for 10 years, but she’s brand new to Massachusetts. Last fall, she moved from São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. She’s here because of a new district program that recruits bilingual teachers and helps them get H-1B work visas.

“If teachers are hard to find nowadays, bilingual teachers are harder,” said Everton Vargas da Costa, the district’s coordinator of talent acquisition learning and growth. “So when we started expanding our dual-language programs [in 2018], we realized we’re going to have to recruit overseas because we could not find the talent here.”

Across the U.S., many school districts use the J-1 visa system to recruit foreign teachers. But that program has a five-year time limit. If the visa holder wants to come back to work in the United States, they have to return to their home country for two years before they can reapply. Framingham’s program is for H-1B visas, which can be granted for up to six years and opens the door for a green card application, but they’re harder to get.

Potter Road Elementary School Principal Larry Wolpe said it took patience, about six months, lots of paperwork and around $5,000 to bring in each new hire to the district. 

“I just distinctly remember being at the end of so many conversations where I’d think ‘Oh, this might fall through.’ Then thinking, ‘It’s going to work,’ but ‘Wait, it might fall through,’” Wolpe said.

Framingham Public Schools has hired eight teachers through this program so far. Teacher Juliana Santos said she’s excited about the opportunity and added that her cultural background has other benefits too. For instance, it’s helped her connect with the school’s many Brazilian students.

“It’s way easier to understand where these students come from and where they’re at now, academically speaking,” Santos explained.

Other schools and cities, like Boston, are also experimenting with longer-term work visas to help recruit or retain people in hard-to-staff positions, which include teachers. The program is still in the pilot stage, but city officials say they are optimistic about what it can do.  

“It’s a win for the city because our residents really expect excellent services,” said Yusufi Vali, the mayor’s deputy chief of staff. “And we can’t deliver excellent services when we have a labor shortage.” 

More schools seem to be interested in this approach, Vali added. He said several neighboring cities have reached out to learn more because they’re dealing with teacher shortages too.