Concerned parents should come forward once again and convince the Board of Education to address not only the Curriculum Concerns, but also the newly identified "Donoroo" fundraising debacle first brought to our attention in a comment posted on the 10/16/13 Post on "The Experimentation on our Children Must Stop."
As we state in our response comment," "It is time the Board Members realize that they need to ask Dr. Schuster and her administrators some tough questions and get answers, not spin.
ANONYMOUS TEACHER'S COMMENT
Dear 181 Blog,
I am a teacher in our school district. I
have never been so disheartened and dismayed at the morale of teachers and the
state of education in District 181. What happened? We went from a fully high
functioning district with a handful of higher level administrators to a
district with a huge increase in the amount of administrators, with little
experience in the area of their supposed expertise. These leaders want to take
all that is good and change it to their vision. The students are ultimately the
ones who will lose.
The "Learning for All" (aka Advanced
Learning) directive is one of those ideas that appears good on paper and fails
in reality. One of the goals of this directive is to eventually get rid of the
bubbles of support educators--reading specialists, special education teachers,
academic strategy teachers, gifted specialists etc. Right now, administration
wants these teachers to "push in." We now have our most fragile and
needy students trying to receive support in a classroom where other things are
going on. How do we expect them to focus? Is it fair to have them working in
the corner of the room? Eventually, the district wants to put all of those
students in our classrooms and let the regular education teacher meet their needs.
I was told that I need to "increase my capacity." I think I do a
pretty good job meeting the needs in my classroom, but I am NOT a special
education, reading, or gifted teacher. I do not have the specialized education
that they do. And, for years, I have witnessed students growing under and with
these "special" teachers and classes. I am outraged that a few
administrators think that teachers should be able to handle EVERYTHING that the
district is throwing at them and that we should buy in or "find another
job." By everything I mean the following: implementing the new Common Core
standards (which should be first and foremost), differentiate (for gifted,
standard, and struggling students) all subjects and activities every day, form
flexible grouping work for all subjects and classes, meet the social/emotional
needs of students, view data on each student to set individual goals for each
student (even if you have 90-180 students at the middle school), prepare
students for testing, choose multi-leveled texts for students for every area of
the curriculum (even if you have 90-180 at the middle school level),
incorporate technology into our lesson plans (even if it's not available in all
buildings), and increase rigor and develop relationships that are so important
with our students. I was taught that humans have developmental stages and that
you can't force an individual through these stages unless he/she is ready. So,
are our students who aren't ready developmentally somehow behind? I think that
would be like expecting all of our students to be ready to complete in the
Olympics. We understand that some students can achieve this and we foster that,
but we don't expect everyone to achieve this. That would be an unrealistic goal
and humiliating to some students.
Please, bloggers, look into the
CHMS Donoroo debacle. What started out as a wonderful charitable event (the
first three years) ended up a slush fund for the CHMS music department and was
condoned by the principal. This fund was mismanaged and misused. I hope parents
will demand an explanation into what happened and learn the truth about what
has happened over the past three years.
I would personally like to thank
all the informed, supportive parents who have realized that "the Emperor
has no clothes!" Teachers know that it is only the parents that can stop
the madness in District 181. The teachers fear retribution, poor performance
evaluations, and a possible loss of employment for speaking up.
Sincerely,
An anonymous concerned teacher
