PROVIDENCE — As in most years, about 400 teachers around the state will enter their own classroom for the first time this September. For many, it will prove a very difficult first year.

Isolated and alone, some new teachers struggle to balance the demands of running a classroom, teaching content and disciplining students. Nearly 10 percent of all teachers — according to national studies — will find they are in the wrong profession.

State educators want to lessen those problems, advocating more supports for teachers during that critical first year.

But without a comprehensive mentor program and evaluation process, it is difficult for schools to give new teachers guidance and, if necessary, steer them out of teaching.

Friday, the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, which represents teachers in 11 districts including the state’s largest, Providence, announced plans to launch a more rigorous teacher-evaluation and mentoring program that has proved successful elsewhere.

The state requires that teachers be evaluated every few years. But the standards and rigor of evaluations are left up to districts, with uneven results.

Union leaders said they would begin a yearlong planning process to modify the Peer Assistance Review for Teaching Excellence, a widely respected peer-evaluation process started 28 years ago in Toledo, Ohio. Similar programs have spread to Chicago, Minneapolis and Rochester, N.Y.

Marcia B. Reback, union president, says she wants to roll out the program in Rhode Island’s four urban districts in September 2010. Reback said the superintendents of Pawtucket, Providence and Woonsocket have said they want to participate in the program, and that union officials are also talking with Central Falls Superintendent Fran Gallo.

“The core of this program is providing support to new teachers,” Reback said. “The model we have now is new teachers go into classrooms and it’s sink or swim. We need to be giving these teachers every kind of support.”

The Toledo evaluation program has removed 400 ineffective teachers over the past three decades, said Dal Lawrence, former head of the Toledo teachers union and the founder of the peer-assistance review program.

In Toledo, there is a “consulting” teacher — a veteran instructor — for every 10 new teachers. Throughout the year, the consulting teacher visits and mentors the new teachers and provides a recommendation to an evaluation team about whether the teacher should continue in the profession. The evaluation team includes administrators and other teachers.

“Most people will tell you the system we have is broken,” said Lawrence, who attended RIFT’s news conference. “Why can’t we fix it with union and management doing it together?”

The program is expensive. Consulting teachers commit to three years, training a total of 30 new teachers before returning to the classroom. Districts pay the consulting teachers’ full salaries during this period. Lawrence said that Toledo hired nine consulting teachers for the 2008-09 school year, at a cost of $1.2 million to the district.

Nationally, the issue of teacher quality is heating up. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have both highlighted rigorous teacher evaluations and mentoring programs in recent speeches.

The topic is receiving more local attention, too. The state Department of Education on Wednesday presented the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education a new framework for more meaningful teacher evaluations.

“Right now, we don’t really have a system. Everyone has a different evaluation process,” said Paulajo Gaines, the state’s director of educator quality and certification. “We are trying to standardize what it is we are looking for when we look at educators.”

The state proposal, which will be the focus of a public hearing in the fall, differs from the teachers union’s proposal in one important regard, Gaines said. If the Regents adopt the new evaluation framework, tenured as well as new teachers would undergo the more rigorous evaluation.

“Research has shown us that the single most important factor in a child’s success in the classroom is the quality of the teacher,” Gaines said. “That’s why our framework applies to all educators.”

jjordan@projo.com