"The Rubber Meets the Road Right Here in Caddo"

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Speaking before the Caddo Parish Public School Board

President Priest, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Board, Dr. Dawkins:

The start of the new school year, the good news and the bad news - the good news for us was seeing all the faces of the “brand new to the profession” teachers at the new teacher orientation last week. Quite frankly, it was a big relief due to our concern over all the confusion created by your actions in changing the retiree policy at the eleventh hour. It appeared for a moment that perhaps you lost sight of the importance of growing the professional ranks by hiring new teachers, that you perhaps didn’t recognize their impact in providing quality education into the future.

We see these new teachers as an integral part of our success. Not only are they a product of the most up to date training, but come from a world similar to our students where technology is considered second nature. We should all encourage them in every way to come to our district and to stay and grow with us.

Again, the good news is that in spite of the chaos, your HR department and Staff development did a great job in hiring and starting them off right. And, when we provided lunch, we were able to tell these new teachers that you, as a board, insured they had the $200 in supply money. And in recognition of what a financial struggle it is to start out, we at the Federation provided the opportunity of $125 professional development grants to help these new teachers prepare their classroom. That’s always good news when we work together.

Now moving on to what you could call good news or bad news, depending on your perspective. Desoto only captured 17 or 18 of our experienced teachers. Thank goodness they only had 22 openings to cherry pick from among our best.

Good news to them and bad to us is that they can do this when they now pay almost $10,000 more per teacher than we do.

And it is becoming increasingly bad news to use the Haynesville Shale as an explanation. It is a little hard to swallow; especially, when we know how much money this district had in our coffers just last year at this time. Simply put, it is not the 64 thousand dollar question, but the 65 million dollar one. Exactly how many state mandates, consultants, and programs did we pay for and how much?

It is definitely bad news to start out a school year with our teacher salaries stymied. It is more bad news to know that we have a state ready to saddle teachers with an evaluation process with all the stick and none of the carrot. When we have support employees who came back and were immediately upset about their salary adjustments. And telling someone that in 10 years you will make more on this new salary schedule than the old while at the same time you see that you are making less than you would if you had received your increment and at the same time knowing that some Central Office folks saw payraises; well, it sure breeds discontent.

And then to finally top this off with discipline issues that have still not been resolved, leads us to believe that if we don’t act, we have the ingredients for disaster.

So, what can we do?

1. Let’s continue the work that we started this past summer to revamp our teacher salary schedules.

2. Let’s look with an open mind at the impact of the compensation study and be willing to make adjustments.

3. Let’s pay people what they are owed and do it in a timely fashion. Too many checks continue to be short because someone did not take the time to input the data. This happens across the ranks from certified to classified. Working people need their money. And telling someone that begins work at the beginning of August that they cannot be paid until September is simply unconscionable in this day and age.

4. Let’s get serious about the assaults and batteries on our school employees. Put the policies and procedures in place to protect the quality of the classroom.

And you know, every single thing we have suggested can be done right here, and we can do it together.

These are our issues. We know you understand as well as we do that regardless of what the state does, for us, the rubber meets the road right here in Caddo.