How far in advance to you get your children's teacher's names?

[sonderella]

Our school could never have class lists ready at the end of the previous school year. I think that works when you have low staff turnover, and a stable community of students. Where I live, everyone's always on the move. Teacher turnover is high, new incoming students is high, and transfers between district schools are high. Even within the school, there are 4-6 teachers per grade, and I can guarantee that many parents would be whining all summer long and trying to switch their kids, if they had enough notice.

Heck, one year they didn't have a final first grade teacher hired until 10 days after the start of school, so the kids got all mixed up anyway. Another year, they were going to hire an additional kindergarten teacher, but decided not to do so, because if they would just divide half of one first grade class in two, they could parcel out 12 students among 4 other teachers, and then take in half of a kindergarten class, to create a split K/1 class. That was also determined after the beginning of the school year. Shockingly, that teacher transferred after that year.

We just got my oldest daughter's assignment today (Monday). Meet the Teacher night is Wednesday. School starts next Monday. I am fine with that.

[germaine2626]

Originally Posted by germaine2626

Years and years ago our school district used to do something similar but it caused far more problems than people would imagine. Sometimes teachers needed to be transferred to a new grade level or school due to changes in enrollments and other reasons. Or teachers would resign and new teachers would be hired.
And, then the children who were thinking about having Mrs. Smith all summer ended up with Mrs. Jones and many times it took Mrs. Jones a long time to bond with her students. For a few kids, it would take weeks.

While our community is pretty stable even a few families moving out can make a tremendous difference on class distributions. We would sometimes end up with some ridiculous situations such as one 1st grade with 20 children and the other with 26 children, or the classes would be "out of balance" in other ways. You would think that this would not happen very often but it happened far more often than you would imagine. And the parents would be irate if we moved their child out of the class where they were assigned before school ended.

Also, with the names of teachers & classes known all summer, some parents complained and complained and harassed and harassed all summer to have their child moved to a different class or to have their child's best friend or best friends moved into the class (that happened a lot). Some of the parents became extremely vocal about teachers who they (often, incorrectly) did not feel were the best teachers in that grade and banded whole groups of parents together in protest. A few times, it got pretty bad, really ugly.

Knowing the teacher & classmates in advance was NOT all rainbows and unicorns. Since our district started to post class lists just a few days before school starts (perhaps 25 or 30 years ago), it has eliminated almost all of those problems. Class lists are balanced for all kids moving in and out and the teachers don't change.

Originally Posted by Idlewile

There are logical pitfalls to every approach. It's fascinating that the goal of one approach is 'eliminating protesting parents' and the goal of the other is 'instilling confidence and excitement in students.'

Either way, in our top-performing public school of 800 students that adopted this approach 5 years ago, the support and reaction for this strategy has been overwhelming positive.

Although it may sound like a reaction to parent protests, the administration and teachers overwhelmingly felt that it did not enhance the educational progress of the majority of the students and promote a positive educational environment.

Maybe in a different district it would work very well, but in my district it did not. And, I'm pretty confident that it would even work less well today. I'll give an example from the elementary school where I used to teach. Three years ago, between the end of school and the first day of school, due to transfers to a different grade level or school, replacements (non-renewals) or resignations, 2 of the 3 Kindergarten teachers, all 3 of the first grade teachers, and 1 of the 3 2nd grade teachers changed.

Two years ago, 1 K, 3 1st grade, 1 2nd grade teacher changed.

Last year 1 K, 1 1st grade, 2 2nd grade teachers changed.

So, with the youngest children, who presumably would care the most about who their teacher would be in the fall, if the school had announced teacher's names in June, out of 24 teachers 15 would have been different in September. While it is true that was an exceptionally high amount of turnover, It is pretty common to lose several teachers every year due to retirements and teacher resignations (even if there are not any firings or "non-renewals").

[Prosze]

School starts the 24th and we still have not received the teacher assignment letter. Open house is this Friday so I'm sure we will get it today or tomorrow. When I asked the school why it hasn't been sent they said it was because many parents have not registered their kids online. Why does that have to be our problem? They know they have x amount of kids per class with x amount of teachers- Assign her a teacher and send me a letter.