Frenzy Over Teaching Test Is Symptom of Italy’s Myriad Woes
Now imagine seeing that ship after a 13-year absence.
When Italy held examinations to fill teaching positions in its public schools last week for the first time since 1999, it set off something of a nationwide frenzy among the country’s despairing, underemployed and unemployed educators. More than 321,000 people applied to take the tests, pursuing just 11,500 job openings.
The ratio said as much about the dim job prospects in Italy, where the unemployment rate is over 11 percent generally and nearly 14 percent for people ages 24 to 35, as it did about the rigidities and territorial mind-set of a public education system that has been dented for years by hiring freezes and budget cuts.
The exam is supposed to be held every three years, but the Education Ministry put it off repeatedly to save money, some critics say. In that time it filled vacancies with temporary hires, making aspiring teachers and unions furious.
Ministry officials say that this year’s exam is intended to right past wrongs and to introduce a new generation of teachers to a work force whose average age is now 50, one of the highest in Europe, after freezing out young applicants for so long. But it was a sign of how widely the country’s economic pain has spread that the average age of candidates taking the test this year was over 38.
Critics of the current system, with its distinction between permanent teachers and temporary hires working precariously for lower wages on contracts of a year or less, say it has become unworkable.
“It essentially kills young people, who are kept on a leash year after year,” said Marco Paolo Nigi, secretary general of the national teachers’ union, Snals-Confsal. “It’s shameful. And it’s a system we’re trying to change.”
The teaching exam last week, though it opened the way for prequalified job seekers to become teachers, became an occasion for new scrutiny of an education and hiring system that many, like Mr. Nigi, say is in need of revamping.
The test itself, the first to be administered on computers, is meant to measure logic, reading comprehension, and math and linguistic abilities. Questions included “What is a touch screen?” and choosing between “would” and “could” on the portion covering English language skills.
Some critics said the exam was a poor hiring tool because it could not measure attributes like a passion for learning and a love of children that are essential in a good teacher.
“There are better ways to determine merit,” said Romina De Cesaris, 37, a teacher of history and philosophy in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast, who has been working for 10 years on temporary contracts. “This mega-quiz is offensive for those of us who have teaching backgrounds. You can pass a quiz and still not have the didactic competence to teach students.”
While Italy’s teacher-to-student ratio is among the highest in Europe, it does not necessarily translate into better education, according to Andreas Schleicher, who advises the head of the 34-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on education matters.
“In terms of student performance, Italy is below the O.E.C.D. norm,” he said. “You have a large number of teachers, but they are poorly paid and have relatively low levels of training. Other systems prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of the classes.”
More than 260,000 candidates sat down to take the test last Monday and Tuesday, trying to answer 50 questions in 50 minutes. Thirty-five correct answers were required to pass and move on to the next phase in the lengthy hiring process; only about 34 percent of those taking the test passed.
Typical among those trying their hand was Valentina, 34, who would give only her first name out of concern for her privacy. She has been practicing law in Rome for the past eight years, but she has not managed to get a full-time job at a law firm. So she dusted off a high school certificate that allowed her to teach primary school to qualify to take the state test and perhaps change careers.
“Maybe this will work,” she said doubtfully as she waited at the gate of a high school in a middle-class neighborhood of Rome.
A Frenzy in Italy Over Teaching Jobs
Now imagine that the last ship passed in 1999.
That was the last time Italy held open examinations to fill teaching positions in its public schools. So when the exams opened this week, it set off something of a nationwide frenzy among Italy’s despairing underemployed educators, drawing more than 321,000 hopefuls for just about 11,500 openings.
The ratios said as much about the dim job prospects facing Italians with unemployment now topping 11 percent — and nearly 14 percent for people age 24 to 35 — as they did about the rigidities and turf-mindedness of a public education sector that has for years been dented by hiring freezes and job cuts.
The teaching exam is supposed to take place every three years. But the Education Ministry has continued to postpone the costly process, while aspiring teachers and unions have fumed. Hiring teachers on temporary contracts, in the meantime, has cost the state less than hiring full-time employees, critics charge.
Ministry officials say this year’s exam was intended to right past wrongs and allow a new generation of teachers to enter a teaching work force whose average age is 50, one of the oldest in Europe, freezing out aspiring young applicants. As it is, the average age of candidates this year was more than 38.
What is clear, critics said, is that the current complicated system for allotting teaching jobs — which differentiates between permanent jobs and annual, or even shorter, contracts that keep many in precarious employment conditions at low wages — does not work.
“It essentially kills young people who are kept on a leash year after year,” said Marco Paolo Nigi, secretary general of the autonomous teachers’ union, Snals-Confsal. “It’s shameful. And it’s a system we’re trying to change.”
While the exam opened the market to pre-qualified job-seekers, its return left few people happy, becoming instead an occasion for fresh scrutiny of an education and hiring system that many like Mr. Nigi agree is in desperate need of reform.
The test itself — the first to involve a computer — is designed to assess candidates’ logic, comprehension, math and linguistic abilities. Questions ranged from “what happens when you press control, shift, alt on a computer” to choosing between “would and could” in the English language portion. Some criticized the exam for ignoring abilities like passion or love of children that cannot be measured.
“There are better ways to determine merit,” said Romina De Cesaris, 37, a history and philosophy teacher who has been working on temporary contract in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast, for the past 10 years. “This mega-quiz is offensive for those of us who have teaching backgrounds. You can pass a quiz and still not have the didactic competence to teach students.”
Some education experts seemed to agree. While the teacher-to-student ratio in Italy is one of the most favorable in Europe, that has not necessarily translated into better education, according to Andreas Schleicher, the special adviser on education to the head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which groups 34 countries in Europe and beyond.
While the country has improved in recent years, “in terms of student performance, Italy is below the O.E.C.D. norm,” he said. “You have a large number of teachers, but they are poorly paid and have relatively low levels of training. Other systems prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of the classes.”
Nonetheless, on Monday and Tuesday aspiring teachers sat down to answer 50 questions in 50 minutes, the first phase of a lengthy process that will land fewer than one in 30 a teaching job. Of the more than 260,000 candidates who took the test, fewer than 34 percent could answer 35 of the 50 questions correctly, the threshold to pass.
Mexican Teachers May Lose Ability To Pass On Their Jobs to Their Children
If you want to see the feudalism toward which America’s public sector unions are headed, look no further than Mexico where teaching positions aren’t a job, they’re membership in a guild that can be passed on to your children so that teachers can give birth to teachers who will go on teaching for all eternity until no one can read or write anymore.
Tens of thousands of teachers are blocking highways and seizing government buildings across Mexico to protest a federal education reform ending their longtime practice of selling their jobs or giving them to their children.
They’re doing it for the children… literally. Their children.
“We’re fighting to guarantee jobs for our kids,” Oscar Miranda said as he helped teachers stage a protest in front of the governor’s office in Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos. “Throughout history the sons of carpenters have become carpenters. Even politicians’ children become politicians. Why shouldn’t our children have the same right?”
Wake up America, this is what we are headed for.
Trying to turn America into Mexico, institutionally and demographically, will lead to actual feudalism, composed of guilds of fake professionals.
But you can also sell teaching jobs.
“Teaching jobs were routinely bought and sold for as much as $6,000. That’s as much as beginning teachers make in a year. The jobs are still coveted because they provide steady income, particularly in poor areas.”
Now that the leftist PRI is back in power in Mexico, they are following through on a pledge to end the whole “Passing on Public Sector Jobs to Your Children” business, which Felipe Calderon tried and failed to do.
Addressing teachers at a ceremony in Mexico City, President Enrique Pena Nieto laid out a proposal that would champion merit-based teacher promotions and chip away at the union’s power to hire teachers on its own terms. “Your rights will be safe because your income, tenure and promotion will not be subject to discretionary criteria. Good teachers will have the opportunity to advance based on their professional merits.”
So how broken does a system have to be before a leftist politician embraces merit promotions for teachers? This broken.
But now can you imagine living in a country where the left is actually opposed to teacher’s unions?
“No more promotions for loyalty, (or) cronyism with union leaders,” said Jesus Zambrano, who heads the leftist opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). “Let’s have promotion be based on teacher merit and professionalism.”
Right winger! He hates the middle class! He wants to destroy education! We need to protect our kids from education reform that will drain us of the best teachers who happen to be genetically born to other teachers!
So teachers’ unions may once again go on strike in Mexico and that’s serious business over there. Sure our teachers’ unions are nasty, but they do worse over there than punch people in the face.
Police raided three teachers colleges on Monday in the western state of Michoacan, where dozens of students had been hijacking buses and delivery trucks for a week to protest curriculum changes.
Masked protesters battled police with rocks and fireworks. Student involved in the campus takeovers burned a dozen trucks and buses before authorities swept in, detaining 176 strikers. Ten police officers were injured, three seriously, the Michoacan state government reported.
The standoff at the teachers colleges began over a week ago, when students seized the campuses to protest plans to require them to take English and computer science courses. The protesters say the colleges are meant to prepare teachers for rural areas where basic skills are more of a priority.
If you want this to come to America, just keep voting for Democrats and keep the borders open.
Rockwood officials looking at cutting teaching positions to balance budget
Teachers and a residents’ group are balking over budget cuts proposed by the Rockwood School District to balance its budget for the 2013-2014 school year.
Those budget cuts would include elementary and high school teaching positions, although actual layoffs of tenured teachers would not come until the 2014-15 year.
District officials hope they can eliminate positions through attrition without actually laying off people, but layoffs would be necessary if not enough attrition takes place.
Chief Financial Officer Tim Rooney said planned cuts in teachers jobs include 10 being dropped due to increasing elementary school class sizes, three gifted instructors, 2.5 positions lost at Rockwood Valley Middle School (the half position is due to some full-time positions possibly being shared between two teachers or part-time staff being used), and four teaching or other positions lost at the high schools based on enrollment.
Rooney said other jobs within the district that would be cut, including a reduction in administrative staff at the district’s central office, though a final number hasn’t been determined yet. Even more posts targeted for elimination include 10 custodian, seven secretarial, two maintenance and two grounds jobs.
District officials said staffing reductions and other cuts would be unnecessary if the district decides enough community support exists to put a tax increase, and possibly a capital improvements bond issue, on a ballot next year.
That possible tax increase and bond issue are being suggested through the Picture Rockwood community engagement effort now under way.
However, some teachers are contending the district should dip into its more than $16 million in reserves before making cuts that would directly affect students. District officials contend dipping into reserves could buy some time but is not a long-term solution for financial challenges.
The district is looking at a $5.1 million budget deficit for the coming school year if there is no tax increase or revenue increase, Chief Financial Officer Tim Rooney said at a Dec. 6 board of education meeting.
The board will sit down Dec. 20 to look over that budget to see if the proposed cuts are viable.
Rooney also presented a list of proposed budget recommendations, totaling almost $10.4 million, that would provide for increases in summer school, maintenance and technology upgrades and professional development classes required to implement state-mandated “common core” academic standards that will take effect in 2014.
To fund those proposals, cuts were proposed for supplies, staffing and increasing the minimum distance for bus transportation to 1.5 miles from one-half mile.
In addition, elementary school class sizes would be increased; full-day kindergarten tuition fees would go up; class sizes in elementary gifted education would be increased at the district’s Center for Creative Learning; and the kindergarten classes would be eliminated at the Center for Creative Learning.
Rooney said the district needs even more funding for proper preventive facilities maintenance, but doing that would increase costs so much that even deeper cuts would be required, which the district is highly reluctant to make.
“Usually, when there’s a deficit, we would just try to cut expenses to get rid of the deficit,” Rooney said.
“But due to the failure of a bond issue in April of this year, we now need to include at least some of those bond issue expenses in the district’s regular operating budget,” he said.
Superintendent Bruce Borchers said any staff reductions would occur over a two-year period and that some cuts recommended in the budget proposal would be through regular resignations and retirements.
He said the district hopes to help some teachers and other staff whose posts are cut switch to other positions that open up due to attrition or by laying off some nontenured teachers working under one-year contracts.
But Rooney admitted that if there isn’t enough attrition, layoffs may be necessary in the 2014-2015 school year.
The district has not decided how many teaching and administrative positions would have to be eliminated, Rooney said.
However, for the 2013-2014 school year, any person, other than nontenured teachers, holding a position that is eliminated by the budget plan will either remain in that job or be reassigned to another position, though it may not be in the same school, Rooney said.
Rockwood has suffered from the economic downturn and decreasing local assessed valuation at the same time student transportation and employee salary and benefits costs have been going up, Rooney said.
The board isn’t expected to vote on final approval of the budget until June, but residents and teacher union representatives are expressing dismay about possible reductions.
“The cuts recommended by Dr. Borchers are a disservice to the students of Rockwood,” said Suzanne Dotta, president of the Rockwood National Education Association, which represents 1,280 teachers, almost 83 percent of those teaching in Rockwood.
“Eliminating teaching jobs, raising class sizes, and cutting secretaries and custodians to fund programs and protect excessive fund balances is not in the best interests of kids,” she said. “The use of fund balances needs to be a piece of this discussion, at least in the short term.”
Dotta also contended many of the proposed cuts are being made at the school building level and are not as great at the administrative level.
She also protested cuts targeting one-year teachers, “treating them as second-class citizens and expendable.”
Eileen Tyrrell, co-founder of the Rockwood Stakeholders for Real Solutions, a residents’ watchdog group, said she was confused that proposed budget cuts were devised without community input, while the district also is involved in a community engagement effort which hasn’t been completed.
She said she’s hearing from some residents who feel budget cuts are being threatened to encourage passage of a tax increase and possibly a bond issue.
“But residents have told me they will not support any more money until Rockwood changes its leadership to restore our trust and confidence, which have been lost due to past bad decisions that have not been acknowledged or apologized for,” Tyrrell said.
Teaching core launched
In an bid to foster value in training during a University, Yale is expanding a training module now accessible for connoisseur students to embody expertise members as well.
Provost Peter Salovey announced in a Nov. 15 email to expertise a origination of a University-wide Yale Teaching Center to reinstate a Graduate Teaching Center, that lerned connoisseur students to be training fellows and take other training positions after Yale. Bill Rando, partner vanguard of a Graduate School and newly allocated executive of a YTC, pronounced a core aims to support training during a University and foster contention of educational strategies. While stability to sight connoisseur students, a YTC will offer workshops for expertise members and mentoring opportunities between tenured and non-tenured professors, pronounced Rando, who served as executive of a Graduate Teaching Center for a past 14 years.
Rando pronounced many of a center’s programs will aim new or youth expertise members, nonetheless that a resources will be accessible to all professors.
“There are so many extraordinary teachers here, nonetheless not a executive place for them to share their strategies,” Rando said. “That is a large partial of what this core will do.”
Graduate School Dean Thomas Pollard pronounced a University will sinecure additional staff to support a YTC’s expansion, nonetheless skeleton are not nonetheless finalized. Currently, Rando, YTC Associate Director Kristin Rudenga and 20 connoisseur tyro fellows manage a Graduate Teaching Center’s programs, that embody a teacher-preparation acceptance module and teaching-fellow training workshops.
Though he does not nonetheless have specific skeleton for a YTC, Rando said, a core will enhance “organically,” as organizers try opposite strategies of enchanting with expertise members. Since a announcement, he said, 5 expertise members have contacted him about eccentric conference on their courses.
“Every training core is a small opposite depending on a enlightenment of a university, and we don’t know what ours will demeanour like yet,” Rando said. “It will reveal over time a proceed [the Graduate Teaching Center] unfolded over time.”
Rando — who is a partial of Ivy Plus, a consortium of training core directors during Ivy League schools — pronounced he is looking during a determined training programs of Yale’s counterpart institutions, including Harvard, Princeton and Stanford for ideas as a module moves forward.
Anders Winroth, a highbrow of Gothic history, pronounced he thinks a Yale-wide training core could heighten a peculiarity of training during a University given a best proceed to proceed a subject for investigate can differ from a best proceed to proceed teaching. He pronounced a training fellows in his harangue march are all enrolled in a center’s training program, and he has attended several GTC workshops himself.
“I remember observant to Bill, ‘I don’t know because you’re usually doing this for connoisseur students. we can consider of expertise who would wish to use these things.’ we positively wanted to,” Winroth said.
Michele Marincovich, executive of Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning, pronounced research-heavy institutions should yield an infrastructure of support to assistance expertise change investigate and teaching. Stanford’s core has worked directly with roughly 60 percent of a faculty, she added.
Terry Aladjem, a executive executive of Harvard’s Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, pronounced he has worked with Rando in a Ivy Plus consortium of training core directors and is vehement about Rando’s ability to use increasing resources to advantage Yale.
“We’ve prolonged regarded Yale as a tighten partner in this business, and we consider this will give us even some-more of a reason to share resources and strike adult communication,” he said.
Four professors interviewed pronounced that before to a origination of a YTC, they exclusively solicited Rando’s recommendation on issues concerning teaching.
Psychiatry highbrow Ben Toll pronounced he contacted Rando 4 years ago for recommendation on improving one of a courses he teaches. Toll pronounced he worked closely with Rando for over a year to redesign a course, adding that given that time, his march ratings have significantly increased.
This semester, a Graduate Teaching Center offering 13 fundamentals of training workshops for departments including history, production and engineering.
Teaching Jobs Eliminated as Changes Come to Liberty Schools
LIBERTY, Mo. — Major changes in the Liberty School District are expected to put about 25 people out of work next year.
The school district is working on a plan to restructure its middle schools, putting ninth-grade students, who are currently still in middle school, with high schoolers instead.
The district says moving students to the high school will give them opportunities that students of the same age have in other districts.
The district redrew its boundary lines for all middle and high schools. There are more than 200 teachers from its four middle/junior high schools whose jobs will be affected by the changes. Ultimately, about 22 teaching positions and three assistant principal positions will be eliminated, although the district hopes some of these eliminations will be offset by retirements and that the teachers will be reassigned in other schools where there are openings.
Hundreds Of Teacher Vacancies In Dallas ISD
DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) - Hundreds of Dallas classrooms don’t have full-time educators. Approximately 300 classroom teacher jobs remain unfilled. A quick search of the district’s website will show a long list of all the teaching positions available, including elementary, secondary, and specialized teaching jobs.
Dallas Independent School District spokesman Jon Dahlander says the teacher vacancy rate has no definitive reason behind it.
“Is it a major concern?” he says. “No its not, but we’re working hard to address it.”
However, teacher association leaders give three reasons why teachers are leaving. It’s because they are faced with more hours and more demands with no raises.
“When you have people taking second jobs, because they haven’t received pay increases in three-four years, people have to find ways to make their families work,” says Rena Honea from Alliance American Federation of Teachers.
For students who don’t have a permanent teacher, a district spokesperson says they have permanent substitutes. A permanent substitute is not a fill-in. They are the teacher for the year because the district hasn’t found an available, qualified educator to take the job.
The current vacancy figures are on par with the number of unfilled positions one year ago.
Dallas says its number of vacancies is normal. The district has ten thousand teachers with 300 vacancies. Compare that to Fort Worth ISD which employees five thousand teachers and lists 47 vacancies.
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Survey: 4200 State Teaching Jobs Shed
The Easton Area School District wasn’t alone in cutting teaching positions for this school year.
According to a state survey released Monday, 4,200 state teaching jobs were slashed for the 2012-2013 school year and EASD had at least 135 of them, the Morning Call states.
The story says that the survey, conducted by the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials and the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators, found 30 percent of respondent school districts cut 4,200 teaching positions through layoffs, attrition and vacancies left open in the 2012-13 school year.
The Easton Area School District cut teaching positions in May and July as a way to close a major budget deficit, school officials said.
A hearing to reinstate some of those teachers was held in September, but the school board rejected that proposal.
Education survey: At least 4200 teaching jobs lost in 2012-13
For the second year in a row, Pennsylvania has lost thousands of teaching jobs and students have lost a multitude of programs and services due to stagnant state and local revenues that are not keeping pace with rising pension obligations, according to a statewide survey released Monday.
The survey, conducted by the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials and the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators, found 30 percent of respondent school districts cut 4,200 teaching positions through layoffs, attrition and vacancies left open in the 2012-13 school year.
That is on top of the 14,590 teaching jobs lost in 2011-12 after Gov. Tom Corbett and the Legislature reduced state education spending on public schools by $854 million, according to a similar survey the two organizations conducted last year.
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Fewer teachers equal larger class sizes and fewer electives and extra-curriculars for students in the 264 out of 500 school districts that responded to the new survey in August.
The survey found 51 percent of districts added more children to classrooms this school year than in the previous school year, when class sizes also were increased. Students had fewer electives in 44 percent of school districts, and they had less tutoring in 35 percent of surveyed districts this school year. Those results are nearly identical to electives and tutoring reductions that occurred in 2011-12, too.
“We are showing no improvement,” said Jay Himes, executive director school business officials association. “Our fiscal situation is worsening as indicated by the survey results.”
The report did not say how many, if any, area school districts participated in the survey. But this school year, the Easton Area School District slashed 135 job, including 72 teaching positions. Parkland School District eliminated 60 positions, including 24 professional staff positions, which includes teachers, and 33 support staff.
Elsewhere the topic of larger classroom sizes has popped up at local school board meetings with Saucon Valley bringing back a fourth-grade teaching position it had cut after facing a backlash from parents decrying classes with 28 children.
Tim Eller, spokesman for the state Education Department, took exception to charges that funding is hurting schools.
“This is the typical rhetoric that these organizations have been spewing for more than a year and quite frankly, they continue to misinform the public,” Eller wrote in an email.
He said if anyone is to blame for funding cuts it’s President Obama.
“All fingers should point to the Obama administration and how its one-time stimulus program created the funding cliff that Gov. Corbett, as well as school districts across the state, faced during his first year in office,” he wrote.
When Corbett entered office in 2011, he was facing a $4 billion deficit. He rolled back the basic education subsidy to 2008-09 levels for the 2011-12 school year.
The Legislature restored some of Corbett’s proposed cuts, resulting in a public education budget that was $854 million less than 2009-2010.
Public schools are mostly being funded at the same levels this year . In addition, Corbett added money to cover the state’s mandatory increase in its share of public school employees’ retirement payments, which originated in the Legislature’s 2001 decision to increase pensions for its members and all state employees.
The survey was released 10 days after the state Department of Education announced that statewide scores on the PSSA math and reading tests, which were administered in the spring, went down. The decline occurred the same year education cuts went into effect and testing benchmarks for student proficiency rose.
State Education Secretary Ron Tomalis claimed the score declines happened solely because of his efforts to stop 100 teachers and principals from cheating at 110 schools. Tomalis said a committee of statistical experts also told him budget cuts were not a factor in the statewide drop in scores.
But Tomalis “overstated” the committee’s statistical analysis of scores, said Marianne Perie, senior associate of the Center for Assessment in Dover, N.H., and member of the Pennsylvania Technical Advisory Committee.
Perie told The Morning Call that the link between cheating and a drop in scores was speculative and not backed by data. She also said the committee never took a hard look at the potential budget impact.
Jim Buckheit, executive director state Association of School Administrators, said the drop in test scores were caused by budget cuts, rising benchmarks and the cheating crackdown.
In light of those test results, he said, school districts are going to have to learn how to deal with less money because no one believes state education funding will increase significantly anytime soon. School districts are going to have to rely more on technology because local property taxes alone will not be able to cover escalating costs, especially pension costs, he said.
“Nothing is keeping up with pension increases,” Buckheit said. “Then you have health care costs. All these things combined are leaving districts with no places to go except to cut into instructional programs and that’s even when they continue to take money from reserves.”
steve.esack@mcall.com
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TPS Seeks To Fill 47 Teaching Jobs, One Month After Start Of Classes
TULSA, Oklahoma -
Tulsa Public Schools is short of teachers now, just months after they were short on money to pay them.
They have 47 open positions at schools, which started classes four weeks ago.
The shortage has TPS scrambling to find candidates and get them hired, but the problem is finding applicants qualified for the subject matter.
In the upper grades, it’s often math and science jobs going unfilled.
There’s a full time, French speaking teacher in the French class at Carver Middle School.
She’s able to teach everything from introductory to advanced classes.
Next door, the students in Spanish can only do the basics – mostly what they can learn with a textbook – because there is no Spanish teacher. The school hasn’t been able to hire one.
“Every day is a day when they’re falling behind on that goal and it affects their high school career,” said seventh grade teacher Angela Loerging.
8/24/2012 Related Story: Enrollment Down At TPS, Teachers Still Outnumbered
All over the district, classes are being taught by long term substitutes, while the district tries to hire teachers qualified in the subject matter.
They try to find subs who know the material, but that’s not always possible.
“At this point, we haven’t found one who can speak Spanish,” said Principal Melissa Woolridge.
Woolridge said any specialty subject like language is hard to fill, but math and science teachers are hard to find as well.
“We are still down in the number of teaching positions that we have,” said Superintendent Keith Ballard.
Superintendent Ballard said the combination of budget cuts and a wave of retirements left the district with fewer positions – and not enough applicants to even fill those.
“And we just ended up with not having hired enough,” Ballard said.
Loerging says the other teachers try to help substitutes develop daily plans to teach as much as they can, but the students can’t get what they would with a full-time teacher.
“They’re ready and eager to start doing high school coursework that we’re just not able to offer them, right now,” Loerging said.
TPS hired a couple of teachers this week, but as of noon Thursday, was still 47 short.
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