However, there is much
inequality in the public schools as well. In affluent areas parents are
supplementing budget limitations with private funds, and thus afford schools to
provide top facilities, rich arts programs, and excellent academics.
Public schools in privileged areas
offer an excellent education, that, in turn, provides their students opportunities
at prestigious universities. These are schools where professional fathers put
demands on administrators and teachers, with the ever presence of law suit
threat, and leisure mothers volunteer unlimited number of hour at school, and
raise unbelievable amount of funds for its programs.
I watch the school facilities
at my area, where my kids went to school, and I see new buildings, new modern theater, state of the art gym, a whole turf football field that any professional
team would have loved to have, and hear about the ever-growing academic, sports
and arts programs.
Reality bites, then, when I go
to work at the city school district; the differences are striking! Mostly old
buildings, smelly bathrooms, many classrooms located in bungalows, built in
haste to accommodate growing students’ population, far away from the center of
the campus, without adequate bathrooms and drinking water fountains. Schools
that severely cut their extra curriculum programs - arts, theater, car shop, wood shop,
agriculture, music, foreign languages; programs that are being discontinued one
by one, year after year, leaving students with very few options, and displacing
wonderful teachers, or forcing them to an early retirement.
The ugly face of budget cuts
is not only old building with dirty classroom, shabby, smelly bathrooms, and
unclean, littered, yard. It is not only discontinued excellent programs and
dispersing wonderful staff members, it is also unsecured schools!
But, of course, the worst
face of budget cuts is overcrowded classrooms, shortage of teachers, aids, and
counselors. Not enough administrators, and discipline deans!
As a substitute teacher I see
the budget cuts consequences every time I step into school premises; results
are obvious everywhere I go.
One example is a middle
school in the west side, that used to be well managed, and I watch it now getting
worse every time I am there. The first thing that caught my eye, recently, was lack
of security at the entrance, not even a parent volunteer. The path from the
entrance leads to the main office, but also to classrooms on each side of the
campus; a stranger can wander in without any disruption. When, at last, I met
the sole security person in the school he told me that they are very limited in
resources, and sitting at the gate is not a priority…
There are many other
consequences for not having enough security on campus, on top of compromised
safety; a phenomenon of students wandering around, freely, during class
sessions, without supervision. I was surprised and alarmed to read a note from
the classroom’s permanent teacher about students ditching during the last two
periods of the day. Ditching? At 6th grade? And the school cannot do
anything about it? But of course, with only one security guy for the whole
school, and with deans of discipline being considered an unnecessary expense
at many middle schools, students are taking advantage of the lax discipline …
I have seen good schools
turning into terrible schools, and vice versa, for just one reason, relaxing or
tightening security and discipline, nothing else! All it takes is one good
administrator, dedicated specifically for discipline, and a school can turn completely
around, but due to budget cuts, some schools get rid of this function.
A major consequence of budget
cuts is class size. Seating forty students in one classroom, especially in a middle
school, has terrible consequences on students teacher’s communication. Class
size may not matter in high school honor classes, although I doubt it too, but
in lower classes, and especially in middle school, ten extra students per
classroom can make all the difference.
One of the effects of budget
cuts was cutting janitorial services, causing good, hard working men and women,
to lose their jobs because the district had to tighten its expenses, and cleaning
was declared unnecessary. As a result, teachers and students step into filthy
classrooms, with dirt and papers all over the floor, left there the previous
afternoon, and still there early in the morning. Is it an academic issue? Not
necessarily! Is it educational issue? Absolutely!
Fortunately, unionized teachers’
contract forbids schools to make teachers supervise during their breaks. This
is not the case, however, at charter schools, whose teachers are usually not organized,
and “at will”. Teachers not protected by unions must carry extra duties, to
fill holes in the budget, like supervision, before, during and after school, and,
normally, get no conference period...
There is another side to the
budget shortage that never fails to surprise and anger me; the contrast between
shortages in necessities compared, on the other hand, with ample of waste. Some
school supplies are distributed without any reservation or control, while
others are always scarce. A teacher may have to purchase her own white board
markers, or pay for her lesson materials’ duplications, while students are
provided with endless stock of papers, writing supplies, disposable workbooks,
calculators, top of the line computers, and… free meals.
It would have been all good
and generous if it served only the needy population, but in most cases, it is
unnecessary and wasteful. Students are careless with supplies and are not
accountable for their loss or damage. They are making paper planes out of the
papers, leaving markers to dry, breaking pencils, throwing erasers and crayons at
each other, leaving calculators and computers unattended and unprotected, and
disposing their free meals to the trash!
Since the new, free “breakfast
in class” program had started, I have seen hundreds of unopened milk cartons
left to spoil, meals untouched, returned, in the best case to the cafeteria or
donated to some food service, but usually just left to rot, and end up at the
trash can. What a waste of food, money, and precious teaching time!
Every aspect of budget cuts,
and wastefulness on the other hand, directly effects teachers and their job;
large classes, lack of assistance, lack of discipline, lack of support from
counselors and administrators, dirty classrooms, breakfast in class, lack of
supplies on one hand and excessive supplies on the other, distributing and
watching it being wasted.
Teachers are constantly blamed
for the system’s shortcoming, but have no voice in preventing senseless decisions;
they have no listener or supporter to their real needs or concerns!
