Budget cuts
According to an email I just received from the Arizona Education Association, the House, Senate and our Governor decided to cut the FY09 budget by over $180 million to k12 education. This could mean cuts in paper, text books, making copies... buying new text books has already been frozen. This could also mean RIFs and salary reductions... Tell me, how are we supposed to teach if we don't have text books and we can't make copies of the ones we do have? Any idea how much money comes out of my own pocket to pay for these things already??
Who knows if I would still have had a job if I had stayed at FM, but I wish now I had stayed. I certainly never thought that I'd hear RIF with regard to teachers... some classrooms already have 29 students each! Be afraid people, be very afraid.
Is this happening in VA too? I may have to move back to be able to support myself... Anyone with a basement I can move into?!
7 comments:
Yep - scary stuff going on here, too. Lots of cuts coming:
http://commweb.fcps.edu/newsreleases/newsrelease.cfm?newsid=767
We did, finally, get something positive accomplished for FCPS kids, though:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/22/AR2009012203959.html
In education too? Ugh.
Not that it'll make you feel any better, but in my 8 years of grade school there were never less than 80 kids in a class, and never more than one teacher in the room. The term "teacher's assistant" was unknown. But this was a parochial school, and nuns didn't have any salary to worry about. They were tough (in every sense of the word).
Here's something to think about. It's a clip from an item in today's HuffPost blog.
"Many experts in the key areas the stimulus package involves -- including healthcare and education -- are equally critical [of the stimulus pkg as currently drafted] but reluctant to go on the record since, after all, there is something rather than nothing for them in the current bill. One high-ranking expert on education told me off-the-record: "We are really wasting an enormous opportunity. They are going spend something like $100 billion on education and not get much reform. At this point, they would have so much leverage to get the unions to really think differently. Unions are worried about teacher layoffs. So Obama could say we'll give you money in exchange for tenure reform and teacher accountability. The president has a lot more leverage than he's using to rebuild a system that's not working." "
It's a different world than when you were in grade school. And yes, we need reform. But for them to say there is no teacher accountability? Are they kidding? And how does withholding money help to get reform? Money is needed to implement reform! And in the meantime they cut salaries, positions, and stuff like textbooks and paper. It's a fucking mess.
Re accountability, they are talking mainly about failed systems like D.C. and elsewhere, where teachers' unions have successfully thwarted reform for years (although the current team of Mayor Fenty and Superintendent Rhee appears to be making headway). Withholding money from uncooperative groups (e.g., unions that refuse to allow incompetent teachers to be weeded out) can be a VERY effective tool to achieve reform in such places.
Yes kiddo, it's in VA too. Fairfax County is having meeting currently.
School hours may change from elementary to starting at 7:50 and ending at 2:30 so that HS can start later (which I do agree with the HS change). Frozen salaries, reducing support and administrative staff and much more.
Wish you were still here too but for other reasons !
Darlingdame
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