Operating Budget Testimony
Board of Education
January 20, 1998
Good evening Mr. Felton, Members of the Board of Education, and Dr. Vance. I am JoAnn Zuercher, here with Lafe Solomon, co-coordinator for the Walt Whitman Cluster. We are happy to have this chance to testify as part of a tri-cluster group and to support the testimony of the Walter Johnson and Bethesda-Chevy Chase clusters. Each cluster will address different portions of the Operating Budget. I will be addressing some staffing issues.
We fully support the reading and math initiatives in the budget presented by Dr. Vance. We want to emphasize that we strongly agree that additional staff development is needed to take advantage of these initiatives. But there is one unresolved issue -- the scheduling of the training. We hear repeated concerns from principals, teachers, and parents about the disruption to classroom instruction that occurs when teachers must be absent in order to take part in needed training. The teachers receiving training are forced to leave lengthy lesson plans for their substitutes and then forced to play catch-up on their return. There is something wrong with a training model that delivers classroom instruction training at the expense of classroom instruction.
In addition to instructional disruption, there are very pressing difficulties in finding adequate numbers of substitute teachers and this is only likely to become a greater issue in the next several years. We propose that staff training occur outside class time. Teachers should be given two or three scheduling options so that they can pick the one that best matches their needs. Further, they should be compensated for this additional time. Either the school system can pay increasingly-difficult-to-find substitutes or it can pay the teachers. We strongly recommend the latter.
We flnd the flexible staffing for elementary schools to be a decided step in the right direction. Under Dr. Vance's proposal, elementary school principals will be able to choose among a 0.5 instructional support teacher or turning either a half-time counselor or reading specialist position into full-time one. We believe, however, that regardless of size every elementary school needs a full-time counselor. Students do not face problems within neatly designed time frames that match a part-time counselor's schedule. The investment in full-time counselors increases the likelihood that behavioural issues are identified and treated earlier in a student's career, lessening or eliminating their impact at the middle and high school stages where consequences may be more serious.
As we see it, elementary schools should not have to use the 0.5 flexible staffing position to make their full-time counselor positions full-time. We recommend that the operating budget be modified to provide that all elementary schools receive full-time counselors in addition to the option to upgrade either a reading specialist to a full-time position or to obtain a part-time instructional support teacher.
Elementary school secretaries face steadily increasing duties but recent budgets have not allowed for the additional staffing to meet these responsibilities. We support the Superintendent's four-year initiative to add 40 ten-month secretarial positions to make sure that each elementary school has one full-time secretary. This will help alleviate situations where such inadequate secretarial,-staffing leads to lack of any office coverage in the summer months. Additionally, we want to point out that the full-time administrative secretaries have duties that range from those of a registrar, financial assistant, nurse, and counselor to community relations coordinator helping with school tours and after hours school use. Without a second full-time secretary it is difficult to accomplish all the work that must get done.
The secretaries also can have a direct impact on the students' educational experience. Often a disruption in routine as simple as lost lunch money is extremely upsetting to small children. The secretaries' ability to calm the-children and deal with these situations allows children to return to the classroom in a state of mind where they are able to learn. One full-time position alone is insufficient to handle all the roles and the duties that are demanded of the staff in the front office.
Flnally, we see additional benefits in the proposal to add student support specialists for secondary schools. The three year initiative to add seven positions per year should continue the positive impact of these positions on student behavior and related academic success. Students lose valuable instructional time when they are forced to wait in the front office until a school administrator is free to see them.
Students generally are sent to the front office for being disruptive in class or some similar reason. Student support specialists would provide meaningful resources to deal with these situations in several ways. First, the support specialists would be more readily available to the students which would cut down on lost learning time and the specialists would be skilled in dealing with these types of behavioural issues. One middle school principal with whom I spoke also saw long-term benefits to the students and the broader school community in that problems dealt with earlier are less likely to grow in seriousness to the point where the principal must be involved. The same principal also foresaw that in his school he might use the specialist to provide instructional materials and guidance to help cover the classroom work that was missed.
Another benefit would be to alleviate pressure on the front office. Now students go to the office where the principal may or may not be able to see them. This means that administrative staff bear some of the burden and the students do not receive resources such as meaningful and constructive support and discipline designed to help them avoid the negative behaviour in the future. As the situation now stands, there is nowhere for students to go when they have a behavioural problem requiring time-sensitive resources.
In sum, we hope that you adopt Dr. Vance's proposed operating budget with the modifications that our tri-cluster is suggesting. We will work with you in urging the County Council to fund this fully.