I received an e-mail from a teacher the other day. She portrayed a world we don’t normally see.
Teachers working 50 or more hours a week (paid for 40). Grading papers at home. Meeting with parents after school. Buying supplies not only for the classroom but also for children who can’t afford them. And that includes clothes, book bags and Band-Aids.
“Ask anyone with a teacher in the family and they know,” the teacher wrote. “It is just wrong to think we work 8-3.”
The teacher said make no mistake. She is grateful for her job, but anyone who thinks teachers are overpaid – like our legislators who think teachers should not be paid for days students are not in school – should go get a teaching degree and see for himself what it’s like.
“Those built-in 10 days we have in our contracts when students do not attend school are only the ones for which we get paid,” she said. “All the days during the summer, weekends, etc., are on our own time. We get no overtime, but we do what we do because it has to be done.”
She worked eight days this summer with no pay. She gets $250 a year for supplies and estimates it doesn’t cover a tenth of what she truly needs to teach properly.
But she has a bigger point: public education represents the future of our state, a state that invested hundreds of millions of dollars to get Boeing to built a plant near Charleston.
“Shame on you!” she wrote. “Investing in children and our public education system will provide a highly qualified workforce.”
She said she provides love and counseling and performs negotiations that would impress the United Nations, nurses wounds, seen and unseen, and teaches.
“I worry every day if my students are getting enough to eat when they aren’t at school, cry when they have to move again because their parents have to move for lack of employment, and sometimes am the only person there for them at awards day or parent/teacher night,” she wrote.
She also takes classes that she pays for. If professional development days are eliminated, it removes not only the opportunity, but also the incentive for teachers to learn and grow in their profession.
“Of course, what am I expecting? Do I think that politicians can afford to do without their staffs or something?”
But she’s not just complaining. She has suggestions:
Stop the sales tax holiday, which generally saves a family no more than $30.
Make awards programs such as Palmetto gold, silver, SAT award, teacher of the year every other year, not annual.
Give the $250 supply money to first and second year teachers and science teachers who often buy lab supplies themselves.
Make judiciary, legislative, corrections and other state employees pay for professional development themselves.
Cut or reduce the Education and Economic Development Act to eliminate expensive mandates.
Make all state employees take a furlough.
There were several more, but the picture she is trying to paint is clear: school districts are a shapeless entity without a face, easy targets for state-mandated cuts.
The faces we should see when we talk about reducing school funding are of those teachers in the classroom and the children who look up to them.
Here’s how she put it: “I am a teacher because I love children and I hope that what I do in the classroom inspires my students to do greater things in this world.”
