Article by WashingtonStateWire. Published on Monday, May 09, 2011 EST.
The Reason K-12 Is Upside Down Is Because It Is Backward
It’s happening all over the state. The notices are going out to staff about layoffs. Why, because of budget cuts, and honestly declining enrollment is another contributor, but that’s another story. The quote from Bellevue is typical and pasted below from a Seattle newsource:
Earlier this week, Bellevue announced it will make $5 million in cuts by reducing its teaching staff by the equivalent of 60 full-time certificated-instructional staff, two administrative jobs and eight classified jobs. Seattle Times
Sixty instructional staff and two administrators! Have you ever looked into “administrating” at a school district? Someone should. I only spent five years on a suburban school board, but it did not take long to learn we were top heavy with former teachers who chose to escape the drain of the classroom to the organized desks of the ad building.
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It is time that the districts actually manage. Their fiscal calendars are still hangovers from our agrarian culture of a hundred years ago. They have to set budgets before they know how much money they have. A lot of these laid off teachers will sit all summer hoping to be hired back in the fall (what a life).
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Last in first out? Please, can we get over this someday? Yes, guess who gets the ax? In Seattle they call them provisional teachers. Provisional my ___. These are the youngest, recently educated, most energetic, most tech savvy, most passionate, hardest working of the group. They will get fired so the older, most boring teachers who have decades of life and culture between them and the students and can least relate, will stay on at higher salaries. It’s backward.
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Administration? My closest good example of bloat is Kitsap County. We have five full sets of administration. The county is about 40 miles long and a few miles wide. We have a full component of administrators, doing the same what-ever-they-do every eight miles. Nothing screams out for centralized admin like schools districts.
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And finally, why is this even happening? I mean it is clear the constitution tells, requires legislators to make education the “paramount duty of the state.” My tenure at public schools must have revealed an incorrect meaning of paramount.
This is no way to run a railroad.
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