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"We want to keep young, well-educated people - quality professionals who can educate our students," she said.
Under the program, teachers with less than one year of classroom experience will be assigned a mentor teacher who has at least three years of classroom experience. The pair will be required to have 90 contact hours per school year, such as attending professional development meetings, teacher training and workshops and especially private meetings and classroom observations.
Ratcliff said first-year teachers and their mentors will sit in on each other's classes at various times, and first-year teachers will also observe the classes of other teachers.
Mentor teachers are compensated for their time by the state to the tune of $1,000 per school year. The law states that mentors may not have more than two first-year teachers under their wings.
Ratcliff said the program was designed to stop first-year teachers from becoming overwhelmed by their duties and leaving the profession - something the county has not had difficulty with, she said, but has been a problem statewide.
"There are a lot of reasons there, but a lot of times it's just frustration," she said. "New teachers leave for various reasons, and sometimes it's because they feel they don't have the support that's necessary."
Ratcliff said the demands of teaching sometimes results in first-year teachers abandoning education and putting their degrees to work in other fields. English teachers sometimes turn to journalism, she said, while math and science teachers look into the business field.
Sometimes, new teachers choose to stay in education but move to other states to start anew, Ratcliff said. She said part of the inspiration for the new pairing program was to retain new teachers in Mississippi.
"Other states are doing a lot of heavy recruiting, and one reason Mississippi is doing all this is to beef up our recruiting efforts," Ratcliff said.
Ratcliff said the district has successfully used similar pairing programs in the past on its own initiative, but no official mentoring plan has ever been implemented. With a voluntary, compensated pairing plan now in place, Ratcliff said not only should the retention rates for new teachers improve, but the teachers should also grow more quickly.
"A lot in teaching comes from experience, and the more they experience, the stronger they become in the classroom," she said. "These mentor teachers will share things they've learned so a beginning teacher doesn't have to learn it all on their own."
The Brookhaven School District has also used mentoring in the past, but the new program will improve mentoring efficiency by narrowing the focus, said Curriculum Coordinator and Federal Program Director Marsha Woodard.
Woodard said her office has employed a liaison to the district's schools for mentoring new teachers for the past two years. But the liaison's time was spread across the whole district and mentored all new teachers - not just first-year teachers.
This year, all of the district's 12 first-year teachers have been assigned willing mentors.
"This program will be more focused, and mentors will be able to give more of their time to first-year teachers," Woodard said.
