I want my 8 days back.
This past week my school district, in conjunction with our various employee unions, agreed that the best strategy for meeting statewide budget demands was to hack 8 days from the school year for all programs in the district. They also decided to cut 2 full time positions at my school. I understand their dilemma, having to meet the Governor’s request for a 9% reduction based on income tax revenues, and I also applaud their decision in that few of my colleagues (most of them young and energetic) will lose their jobs. Yet, when I sit and think about what it means to lose 8 days of school, I grow more irate at the situation that the economy has plunged our districts into.
In “teacher terms” what does 8 days look like for me and what does 2 people cut mean?
a) An entire unit of study, GONE. As a history teacher, any time I lose a single day of school (snow, electrical failures, day after the Super Bowl…), I have to cut some aspect of civics or economics or history that I think that kids can use.
b) Time to prepare, GONE. When you lose those kinds of days, the scaffolding you’d like to do with the units and assignments you do have gets hurried. Differentiation? Not so easy. Trying to dial back to help students reach proficiency? More challenging now.
c) Those 2 positions translate to a loss of 2 actual classes from my department, which means my class size will go up (we’re looking at 36 or 37 in a class at this point).
d) A 3 to 5% pay cut. I’m not going to cry about it, because teachers have been less affected than other professions, but I should at least say it, so people know.
e) The realization that our educational system is falling steadily behind other states and (more importantly) international schools that offer upwards of 220 days of school.
I guess what this leads me to is what can be done about this? How do we get a full school year and a reasonable amount of staff per school?
Now, I read the blogs on Oregonlive, and I know that some people out there want to slice off every administrator or (and this was a real comment) “cut teacher salaries by 25%,” but I hate to say that neither of those is all too realistic.
I’m curious as to what can be the compromise solution? You see that Portland Public wants to cut P.E., and while that doesn’t appeal to me, is cutting programs like that a possible route for all schools? Should we offer the bare minimum to students? Meaning – no Auto shop, no Woods, no Arts? Are schools responsible for athletic programs or should that be left to the extensive network of club sports that have propagated throughout the country?
Or maybe this problem is an issue of our tax system? I grew up in New York, which (between state and county) had a high sales tax. While I don’t think that the sales tax is necessarily the answer, since it is a “regressive” tax system, maybe the income would be a bit steadier for the state and the school systems would not be submitted to these cycles where there is a constant concern about funding?
I am not necessarily interested in debating the merits of each element here, but actually arriving at a solution. As the parent of two school age children as well as a teacher of nearly 200 more, I am not happy at all about losing my 8 days. And really, none of us should be. But we have a responsibility, I think, to craft a real solution that is fiscally appropriate and educationally sound.