Its been a tough week in my battles with the Volusia County School System. I hate to admit it, but our children are facing outright educational abuse. Educational abuse you say, yes, that is what I say. So what is educational abuse? Its when we send a constant barrage of messages to our children that we as a state, and as a community, don’t care much about their education at all. Not every one is at fault, but we are all responsible and some serious changes need to be made – on all sides, teachers union, teachers, administration, parents, and the state as a whole.
We educationally abuse our children when we send them to school every day but the teachers who are supposed to teach them take 3 day weekends on a regular basis. OK, I know that teachers can build up a lot of leave time and have a lot of sick days or personal days, but does that mean that they should use them? These benefits are much greater than any found in the private sector. Our children need to rely on their teachers showing up everyday so that a relationship can be built for learning. Right now, in Volusia schools, too many teachers are selfishly taking advantage of their leave and leaving their students behind.
For example, my daughter called me yesterday from Deltona High during her 7th period class. I asked her what all the noise in the background was and she told me that her class along with about 100 other students were in the auditorium, or “learning center” as the school now calls it. What happened was that her teacher and several other teachers didn’t show up for work yesterday and their wasn’t enough substitute teachers. So the school warehoused the students in the auditorium without any instruction. My daughter says this happens two to three times a week. This same story made the news a few weeks ago at DeLand High as well.
Incensed, I emailed the Principal at Deltona High asking him what the average daily teacher absenteeism was. He replied that he has 175 teachers on staff and on any day the absentee rate is from 8 to 10 teachers who didn’t make it to work. Assuming the average includes days when several more teachers are absent, I will use 10 as a regular number, that is nearly 6 percent. So, on any given day, 6 percent of Deltona High School’s teaching staff isn’t at work; remember, that is each and every day that school is in session. Ask yourself, how would your business or the company you work for be doing if everyday 6 percent of the workforce was absent?
I am totally convinced that this problem can be solved with an end or a major reform of the tenure laws. Personally, and as a pro-labor person, I find no purpose for teacher tenure in K-12 education. All it has done in my experience as a parent of a child in the Volusia school district is to lavish unnecessary leave benefits on teachers and allow too much dead wood to hang on to positions long after they have burnt out and lost their “game”. Let’s end tenure, pay teachers who show teaching performance more, but require them to show up to work or lose their jobs.
Now for the rest: parents; community; state; we must stop pretending we are funding education properly in this Florida. Florida Senate Ways and Means Chair, J. D. Alexander, a Republican from Lake Wales was quoted in the Orlando Sentinel today stating, “I have spent 11 years trying to fund schools better; and I want to do that”. No, you and everyone else has not. You’re either lying to us or to yourself or both. We in Florida haven’t made any attempt to properly and reliably fund education and we continue to ignore the facts staring us in the face, mainly, that we have NO reliable source of revenue to fund education.
We must finally admit that our tax structure in Florida, designed in the 1930’s, is no longer viable and can no longer meet the needs of the residents of this state. As a result, we are slowly collapsing the education system here and abusing our children at the same time.
A family would have to be completely stupid to move from a state like Iowa or Wisconsin, that have great well funded public schools, to Florida for any reason. Yet so many who have reared their children in such states move here for the weather leaving their grown and well educated children up north for all or part of the year; probably telling them not to move to Florida because of the schools.
This mode of thinking is based on fleeing responsibilty which I have written about before in earlier posts. We need to begin to behave and act as a state instead of a territory. We need to completely restructure the tax code in Florida and implement an income tax. If not paying taxes is the only reason to move to Florida besides warm weather, then retirees should move to Costa Rica or Equador for that. Go ahead, flee your country and the responsibilities that go along with being one of its citizens. The rest of us will do what we must to end the educational abuse of our children.
Tags: education, Florida, retirees, teachers, tenure, volusia county
I agree with all you are saying. It seems that education is not a priority in Florida. Its sad when you place more importance on a football coach than you do on teachers. Even pay them more than teachers. It has come to point where more money is aloted to sports than teaching. And the administration is so much more interested in winning a championship than making sure our kids are educated. What are we teaching the students? That unless you are a football player, you are not important.