RALEIGH - The last class of the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program will graduate this Spring. The program recruited students across the state to study and work as teachers, which Keith Poston, President and Executive Director of the Public School Forum of North Carolina, says was a unique boon to the state.

"This has been a very successful and really innovative program," Poston says. "The first of its kind in the country to offer four-year scholarships to bright high school students to enter teaching, and to repay the scholarship, they agree to teach for four years in North Carolina."

The General Assembly voted in 2011 to end the program, citing budgetary concerns. The fellows program was created in 1986, during the governorship of Republican Jim Martin, in response to issues with state education.

"We were not getting the quality of teachers that we wanted and we weren't getting the numbers that we needed. We saw this as a way to elevate the profession." Poston says. "It was recruiting from across the state, so we had teaching fellows from every county in North Carolina."

Poston is opposed to the closure of the program, which comes at the same time as enrollment in teaching schools such as Appalachian State declines.

"That's just one campus of the UNC system that is seeing double-digit percentage decreases in the number of students going into the teacher prep program," he says. "And the UNC system is the largest source of teachers in North Carolina."

Poston also points out that education in North Carolina is facing more obstacles than just the closure of the Teaching Fellows Program.

"There's been reports in the news over the last year that we lose teachers now who move from North Carolina to South Carolina because of the very low teacher pay here in the state," he says.

Since 1986, the Teaching Fellows Program graduated more than 8,000 Teaching Fellows, 64 percent of who stayed with the public school system for six or more years.