This is an organic document and will be edited for clarity and additional information. As always, I welcome fact-checking.
1. Compel/require RPS to ensure that all buildings are in compliance with fire code before the first day of school.
2. Compel/require RPS administration to adhere to the collective bargaining resolution and agreement.
3. Be prepared to vote “yes” on a policy allowing the designated representative of workers' unions to be on “full release."
4. Commit to working towards establishing 30 consecutive, unencumbered minutes of duty-free lunch for RPS employees and students (minimum 20 minutes seat time).
5. Move School Board meetings to a location that is accessible by both public transport and has parking (ex. MLK Middle)
6. Collect meaningful teacher retention data, disaggregated by school, subject, experience level, and degrees/graduate hours of those teachers. Require RPS to periodically update the School Board and the public re: the numbers of licensed certified teachers in each building as compared to the number of uncertified instructors and instructors without Bachelor's degree.
7. Work collaboratively with the REA to address the teacher retention apocalypse.
8. Explore adding an ex officio member of the REA to the School Board.
9. Require RPS to have a third party review the RPS200 data, ideally a professional statistician or education data analyst from one of our nearby institutions of higher learning.
10. Require RPS to clarify and make transparent the process by which RPS determines that teachers, staff, and community members are in favor of implementation of RPS200.
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More to follow. I'm also reaching out to teachers to ask them to build their ideal school board candidate.
ELABORATION:
1. At present, the RPS website indicates that buildings are to be cleared of fire code violations by September 30 of a given school year.
That's not good enough. In a school system in which not one, but TWO buildings burnt to the ground, I should think it would be obvious that no child should walk into a building with fire code violations.
3. On RPS's own website, it states:
i.e. to take unpaid leave for the duration of their term as president of their organization, as is provided for in the RPS procedures/policies currently "active" on the RPS School Board website.
4. REA proposed this in the collective bargaining negotiations that took place in the fall and winter of 2022. RPS rejected this.
Let that marinate. RPS refused to guarantee that its workers could have 30 minutes for lunch. They didn't even offer a COUNTER PROPOSAL of 25 minutes, or 20 minutes. This is just ONE example of how RPS bargained in bad faith, meaning they had no intention of authentically engaging with the collective bargaining process. It's not bargaining if you only concede what you had pre-determined to agree upon.
9. Adding 20 days to one school's calendar costs between This is a very expensive intervention; therefore, the public has a right to know if extending the school year impacts academic achievement, or what other variables might be at play, including:
RPS200 schools receiving a much greater allocation of tutors than other schools;
students on the edge of passing being pulled from recess, music, PE, etc for intense remediation.
Also, we need to understand whether or not a given RPS200 school had fewer certified, licensed experienced teachers the year before the implementation,
This data need to be interrogated by someone with no dog in the fight.
10. Does a bare majority (just over 50%) voting "yes" seem like a fair result to use to change the work life of the other 50% of workers in such a profound, dramatic way. Many, many teachers chose this profession in order to spend summers with their children.
Audit the polls from Woodville and Oak-Grove to determine how many licensed/certified teachers voted in favor of these changes.
Require RPS to address the Woodville workers concerns that they voted "no" in December 2023 and RPS barreled ahead with the pilot anyway. This is a very poor look for a school system that claims to value teacher retention.
Monitor the impact of changing the calendar on the composition of the teaching staff at RPS200 schools. Did schools lose more experienced teachers? How many of these teachers who left were able to obtain transfers that they wanted?
How many teachers left RPS because they did not want to participate in RPS200?
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