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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

IUSD mass email...foreshadowing evils ahead...

So I'm currently long-term subbing for IUSD. During lunch, one of my colleagues received an email from the school district. It was a notice to teachers to start leaving aside 10% of their paychecks for now on for a rainy day fund, because the district is planning on having a $20 million dollar budget cut, just the district alone! Nothing is official yet, but they decided to send out a notice just in case. Other important notices provided within the email: the school year will have 23 furlough days for the academic school year 2011-2012 (instead of the school year being the traditional 183 days, it would be cut down to 160 days) and teachers should be prepared for a 10% pay cut for the 2011-2012 academic school year.

What worries me are the students. Twenty-three days taken from them is a significant number of days they could have spent learning. Questions then start popping up--"Are teachers still accountable for teaching all of the curriculum provided by the national standards?", "Will state testing still occur, because that will also take some time out of the school year that could have been spent teaching?", and "Why are we still implementing state testing, especially if we can sort of predict how the scores will turn out with all these educational budget cuts and all." If we stop the state testing for a few years, that alone would save the state so much money. They should use the money and give it back to the schools. Once everything is back to order again, we can start giving state testing again in certain yearly increments.

[Will have a specific post about my perspective on state testing in the future].

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