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Word on the street and the highways and byways of National City, Chula Vista, Bonita, San Isidro and Imperial Beach is that the board is not responding to calls for an explanation. Send in your experiences with board of trustees contact attempts. Send in sample letters. Send in slogans & poster ideas for the April 20 Board Meeting. Send your favorite inspirational quotes. Send in the songs and send out the clowns.
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Mnemonic for remembering email address:
brickwall399@yahoo.com
(We aren't BRICKs in your WALL and 399 = March 9th 2009 =03/09/09 and yahoo for: yahoo we shall overcome!)
2 comments:
Thank you. I will get it together over the break and send in my experiences. Until then, I remain: anonymous....
Here is a letter I wrote weeks ago and would love to send but as a RIF'd teacher I do not feel it is safe. I will post it here and if anyone else would like to take bits of it to send it under their own name feel free: Dear Superintendent Gandara and SUHSD School Board members,
I am writing to express my significant concern with the choices being made by the school board in regards to which areas are most beneficial to cut. I am particularly concerned with the decision to send all TOSA’s from the BTSA program back to the classroom but yet to keep ALL of the TOSA’s assigned to the SEI support team and the academic support team. The teachers who take on BTSA roles are well trained and highly qualified in mentoring teachers and providing support in the classroom. In addition their schedule is highly structured and their time is heavily accounted for throughout each day (and evening). The number of contacts these support providers have with teachers “on the front line” is immense as is the impact they then in turn have on the students in our classrooms. Obviously the BTSA program will continue, as it is required by the state, however the effectiveness of it will be drastically reduced. Support providers will have to neglect their own classrooms in order to take time off to support their mentee’s and to provide regular classroom observations – the most critical part of supporting new teachers in my opinion.
As for the roles of the Academic Support Team and the SEI support team, I have yet to see their impact in the classroom. As you are so fond of quoting President Obama, Dr. Gandara, how about following in his footsteps and providing transparency in their roles. Repeated requests made to both teams to support struggling teachers in my PI5 school have not happened. There are teachers in our district who are teaching SEI classes and have never seen the SEI support provider for their content area. Yet as a veteran teacher with 15 years experience and several years experience teaching ELD I was initially swamped with “support” requiring me to give up my prep time (contractual violation) and being asked to “team-teach” a lesson to learn how to work with these students. I had to miss many days of school to sit in “trainings” that were admittedly (by the presenters) simply a reworking and renaming of techniques that have been around for years. Attendance at those Advanced SDAIE trainings dropped dramatically after the first two meetings – this should be a strong sign to the district on the usefulness of said trainings and that money would be better spent elsewhere. In speaking with members of these two “support” teams, as colleagues, it appears that they spend more time driving around, sitting in meetings coming up with new “plans” and helping create new assessments than actually working one on one with individual teachers in their classrooms. It seems to me there should be an online schedule for these teachers that is visible to all staff. There needs to be accountability and transparency if there is going to be an argument made that they are more vital to the success of our students than our BTSA support providers are on a day in and day out basis.
Why are those teams not targeting teachers with low CST scores, low EOCE scores, etc. and spending day after day IN their classrooms, meeting with them weekly, and providing intensive support and coaching. Is this not their job? If not exactly whose job is it? Our principals clearly don’t visit classrooms and spend significant time coaching the teachers. We have several very strong teachers on our site. However we also have a few teachers on site who are seriously struggling. Teachers who were not new when they came into our district so they did not benefit from our BTSA program. Teachers who have over 80% of students repeatedly failing summative assessments. We, their colleagues, have spent a great deal of our personal time trying to coach and support them yet we can only do so much while still teaching in our own classrooms. These teachers receive satisfactory evaluations because principals do not take the time to sit individually in these classes frequently enough to see the reality of the situation. They do not review assessment data with teachers and help guide them to receiving support needed for improvement. They show up for one or two formal observations a year, which of course are always clearly structured by the teacher and obsessively prepared for in advance. The teacher is allowed to choose the period he/she wishes to have observed and will of course choose the best behaved/performing class. This is not valid data on a teacher’s overall performance. It is this exact situation, which causes distress in the general public about teacher’s who have permanent status and are incompetent.
If it is not under the job description of your newly created Academic Suport Team to support struggling teachers, then why aren’t they creating curriculum resources? I have recently spent over ten hours of my personal time creating a binder of standards-review activities for each of the English clusters. Our department plans to use this material to review with our students during their ELT time. Doesn’t this seem like an excellent resource that could have been put together by members of the Academic Support Team for each of the content areas? It would appear that they have the time and resources to do such a thing much more easily than a full-time classroom teacher. In addition, it would seem that the support team could be working to design a curriculum for the support classes. The idea that support classes will vary depending on the teacher and school doesn’t work with the current model According to the counselors it is not possible, in Chancery, for English and math teachers to be scheduled with their same kids for support as they have for the regular classes. Therefore a specific curriculum needs to be designed for these classes, as there would be in any other new course.
The SEI program in and of itself has been a disaster this year. Students are placed based on CELDT scores from over 12 months ago and in some cases even longer. Many students are placed simply based on ethnicity. When requests were made to use more current CELDT scores the response was that it wouldn’t work with the “master schedule” and the counselors couldn’t make it work with Chancery. It is my understanding that our purpose as educators is to do what is best for students regardless of how convenient it is for the adults involved. I previously worked in a district where the CELDT test was administered the first two weeks of school and the results were used to correct student placement. Once students understood that their results actually had meaning and had an impact on their schedules the scores skyrocketed. The same was true throughout the year in this school – every six weeks students who were scoring at 80% or above on their summative assessments in ELD had a chance to take the DPI (High Point placement test) and move up an ELD level. These students had an amazing understanding of what level they were in, what their CELDT scores were, what their CST scores were and the impact each of those had on their class placements. The overall CST score improvements for the LEP students at that school skyrocketed after just one year of having this program in place.
Students at our schools cannot be given this information, as it doesn’t always hold true. When passing out CST scores to students in English support classes they are asking why they are in the class if they are proficient. The response unfortunately is, well there is no room in any elective so they put you in here. This does not motivate our students to try their best on the CST’s the following year. Students are not empowered to take self-responsibility, as they see no benefit for themselves. This holds true for all other specialty classes such as SEI, ELD, reading intervention classes and math support classes. There needs to be a solid and crystal clear criteria for class placements that involves multiple-measures of assessment and includes teacher observations on students in class performance. These placement guidelines should not be highly guarded by the counselors and the counselors should not be angered by teachers suggesting that a student is misplaced but should instead use that information, combined with the multiple assessment measures, to place a student in the correct class. Again, Chancery is often the scapegoat for this situation. We have huge numbers of students failing Algebra this year and parents who have begged administration to put their child in Math 8 so they can master their basic math skills and find success and yet they have been flat out denied. The high schools will feel the pain of this decision for years to come as these students struggle through years of extended algebra.
When looking at “out of the box” cost saving ideas, why doesn’t one look at the class scheduling process used in our district. The amount of time that counselors spend on simple scheduling and battling with Chancery is obscene for the education level they have. Other districts have counseling clerks, paid an hourly wage (or a salary that is only a fraction of that of a counselors), and their job is largely to schedule students, arrange meetings, set up translations for teachers and parents, etc. Counselors are paid well because they have a significant amount of specialized and advanced training in counseling students. Yet they often do not have the time to do this. You could reduce the number of counselors required at a site if you took away much of their administrative duties and allowed them to simply focus on counseling students and providing support to students Look at models in other districts. Many have counseling assistants for the administrative work and academic and personal counselors for the other areas in which students need support. Allowing counselors to actually counselor would benefit all of us as negative behaviors would decrease - freeing up time for assistant principals to become instructional leaders instead of disciplinarians, and allowing teachers to teach in the classroom and in turn raise test scores rather than constantly handling behavior problems.
The bottom line is that there are many areas that remain to be cut before classroom teachers, teacher salaries, class sizes, and critical elective programs like the arts. More transparency in this process, more out of the box thinking, and less power-struggles would allow us to make it through this challenging economic time without having a long-term impact on the students in our district.
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