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Wake County school leaders are warning that the budget proposed in the NC state senate will require them to:
Quote:
• Eliminate 693 teacher assistant positions out of 1,250 allotted for the current school year.
• Reduce bus service and the number of drivers used to transport students due to a proposed cut of $2.9 million in transportation funding.
• Reduce the school system’s ability to provide driver education classes for students due to a cut of about $2.8 million.
• Increase administrative tasks for teachers by reducing state funding 5 percent for Wake County administrators and 30 percent for the state Department of Public Instruction.
• In addition, local school systems are required to provide salary increases for any teacher paid with local funding when teachers paid with state money receive a raise. Wake says it would need to spend $13 million more for those raises, which “would likely mean additional cuts in personnel.”
Just to touch on two of them. Drivers Ed? Eliminate it. Just two months ago the N and O had an article detailing how bad the program is. Teacher assistants? No such thing when I was in school. OK 3. Administration? ripe for a big cut.
Give all of this freed up money towards raising teacher salaries.
Just to touch on two of them. Drivers Ed? Eliminate it. Just two months ago the N and O had an article detailing how bad the program is. Teacher assistants? No such thing when I was in school. OK 3. Administration? ripe for a big cut.
Give all of this freed up money towards raising teacher salaries.
Driver's Ed is required if kids want to get a license. Many parents cannot afford to pay for private lessons. Does this mean that their children cannot drive?
Teacher assistants are used in lower grades because the classrooms are too large. I'm fine with cutting assistants if you increase the number of classrooms and lower class sizes to a manageable amount for one human being to deal with on a daily basis.
Administration? I agree.
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I've often wondered why Tenure has to be given up in order to get the raise (under this proposal). What is the rational. How does giving up tenure make the raises possible? Is there a good reason for asking teachers to give up tenure or is it simply part of the bargaining and that is the only thing the legislature can ask them to give up.
Driver's Ed is required if kids want to get a license. Many parents cannot afford to pay for private lessons. Does this mean that their children cannot drive?
It's actually not required, just required if you want to get it earlier than graduating high school if I read the regs correctly.
The was the same in NH, if you wanted to get it early you paid for drivers ed. That's what I did, because I had normal teenage jobs (mowing lawns, shoveling snow, paper route etc) and no $400 cell phone to worry about purchasing...
In NC the state contracts to a private business and they are certainly well paid, just look at the cars they are using. Late model, $25k cars. I remember my drivers ed car, it was 10-15 years old!
If you have extra money, sure, go for it but is that the case here? The state can't just print money like the federal government can, so they do actually have to cut programs.
NC has 6 schools in the US News top 1000 high schools in the USA. Two are in Cary. MA, a state with the same population, has 47.
NC Public Schools Flexibility Act was effective July 1, 2013 and eliminated class size ratios in grades 4-12. Class sizes have risen as local school districts have lost over 5,000 teaching positions.
Over the last four years, NC’s public schools have lost 17,278 positions and laid off 6,167 people (35% teachers, 33% teaching assistants) while the number of public school students has grown by approximately 16,000.
NC is behind South Carolina. Let me repeat that for those who think of South Carolina as the worst-case state for everything unless it's Mississippi—which we're behind as well. Our per-student support for K–12 schools has dropped below $8,500 a year, roughly $400 per student less than in South Carolina. It's $1,000 less than Mississippi.
The new proposed changes that would raise teacher pay have a cost. The plan would eliminate all teacher assistant positions in the second and third grades, which means only kindergarten and first-grade teachers would still be allowed an assistant—if and only if the local school board pays for it.
The new plan also eliminates caps on class sizes in grades K–3.
I've often wondered why Tenure has to be given up in order to get the raise (under this proposal). What is the rational. How does giving up tenure make the raises possible? Is there a good reason for asking teachers to give up tenure or is it simply part of the bargaining and that is the only thing the legislature can ask them to give up.
I can't follow the logic.
That's a great point. I think ultimately what will happen is the 25-30 year teachers will be "asked to leave" allowing more teachers to be hired (assuming they can find them) at half their pay. It wouldn't surprise me if that was their plan.
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