By Tracey
Old Mother Hubbard,
Went to the cupboard,
To get her poor class some dry erase markers and sticky notes.
When she came there,
The cupboard was bare,
And so she ran out and bought some.
I’ve always started the year with trips to the store to purchase supplies, but never have I had to buy so much. In addition to the regular pens, pencils, paper, notebooks, and folders, many supplies that were for regular classroom maintenance have also fallen into my lap. I see teachers daily opening up the cupboards in the office that once housed supplies for our classrooms, looking for the basics, such as dry erase markers, index cards, sticky notes, manila folders, envelopes, etc. and there’s nothing to be found. What a prize to find a Sharpie buried deep in the far corners of the tippy-toe shelves. But, I still need dry erase markers to write on the board; and I want my students to have post-it notes to mark places in their reading. So, who picks up tab? I guess I do.
Budgets cuts have hit us hard, and I’m seeing it in more places, not just the bare cupboards in the office. Our para support has been massively reduced. In my district, our contract limits class-size to a certain number depending on the grade. At fifth grade, I’m capped at 26 students. One more student, and the contract says that I get a para educator’s assistance for one hour each day. (A mixed-grade level class is capped at one less. Here’s another reason the multi-age classroom is a thing of the past.) Our school has “balanced out” 22 students to a nearby school that was under-enrolled and was at risk of losing a classroom teacher. While I’m glad a teacher isn’t losing her job, I’m sad to see these students go. These are our neighborhood kids. One student in my class, in her fifth week of school, had to leave to go to the other fifth grade class just to balance out the numbers and ensure I was below the cap.
These cuts tend to have the greatest impact on the poor. Our district made the decision to limit extra curricular supports for students, asking parents to pay for sports and music. While band is not outside of the school day, it’s considered “extra” and non-essential, and students must provide their own instruments. So, even though half my students were interested in joining in band, only two of my students can. (Fortunately for the band teacher, more from other fifth grade class are able to join, so he will not be teaching a fifth grade quartet.)
As I look around my classroom and see the basic supplies I’ve provided so far, and the supplies that will be needed in the months to come, I wonder if this is what the legislature intended – if teacher initiated “bail-out” was the plan for ensuring basic education to our students. How are budget cuts affecting your classroom?
Kristen, you raise a good point. What school districts can’t cover, PTA’s will pick up. And when you compare PTA’s with fundraising events that pull in thousands of dollars with PTA’s in low income communities that just scrape by, discrepancies in school enrichment will be huge. One might argue that low income schools get extra Title 1 funds that might equalize this discrepancy, but the strings attached to that money allow for no enrichment – only more of the same literacy and math instruction.
And Mark, I completely agree with you. It’s an unfair double standard. How ever did we agree to this? Usually, when you bail a company out like that, you become partial owner. We just gave the money away. Privatize the profits, but socialize the risk. Maybe their thought was that once things pick up again, the bank execs wil give back a little by volunteering in your oversized classroom? Er… or giving a little extra to their school’s PTA?
As for how the cuts are affecting my classes and program, the big difference is class size: my classes increased in size by 28%. That makes a big difference when the program is an intervention program with our aims. We voluntarily took that hit, though, understanding that everyone was going to have to give a little…it was either that, or have math completely cut from our intervention model. Since math is the content with which so many of our kids struggle, that was not an option.
It’s a good thing that those execs got that bailout money for their bonuses. I can’t imagine what it must be like to not get that bonus money, I mean, just one of those bonuses would have been enough to fund my home district for FOUR WHOLE YEARS, so imagine the suffering those execs would have had to endure.
I wonder why it is that when businesses struggle, the feds bail them out and facilitate great bonuses, but when schools struggle, teachers are just “expected” to buy supplies out of their own pockets? When those big corporations were operating in the red, how many of those execs took massive pay cuts to save a thousand jobs? Not many, I bet. My guess is they still raked in the dough and didn’t have to buy their accountants’ office supplies out of their own pockets.
The biggest impact on my building has been because of the reduction in force, and it’s gone on for years. We lost our truancy officer, so now truant kids go undetected for a long time. Teachers call home, but we’re not as effective as someone who was able to track kids down all day long.
We lost a secretary. She was in charge of handling all the sports paperwork. Her work has been picked up by our main building secretary, who is doing far more than is humanly possible.
We lost the position that taught remedial math. Almost every child who took this math class passed the WASL last year. This year? Who knows. I guess we won’t make AYP.
We lost a young and talented teacher, who was replaced with someone who has never taught history. We’ll see how that goes.
Kids at my school pay to play sports, pay for science class, pay for art class, and foreign language. I believe these fees can be paid out of an in-building fund, but I don’t think they’re covered by the district.
One of the biggest problems Seattle is going to face as it moves to neighborhood schools is that wealth is not distributed equally between neighborhoods. PTA’s pay for A LOT of extra things in schools. My husband gets reimbursed for classroom supplies out of the PTA’s fund. Children who can’t afford field trips get money from the PTA. PTA’s pay for art teachers, music teachers, supplies. But not every neighborhood has a PTA that can raise $50,000 or $100,000 a year. Soon, Seattle will see a huge discrepency between what is available at one school versus another.