Put money in classrooms
On Aug 6, The Town Talk reported that the Rapides Parish School Board received a $1 million grant to help improve low-performing schools. That evening, the board hired more supervisors to help the low-performing schools. That's more money wasted on administration rather than using it to educate students.
The money needs to go into the classroom; not as another person who occasionally visits schools, but as a person who is in the classroom all the time to see how the students are responding to the teaching methods and who can make changes needed to get individual students to learn.
The method of having a full-time teacher aides and a special-education specialist working in the classroom with the regular teacher in a classroom where a special-needs child was mainstreamed in with the regular students has already proven to be a huge boost to ALL of the students in that classroom. The extra staff was able to help all students needing assistance as well as the special-needs student while allowing the regular teacher to teach to all students and maintain their curriculum. The discipline problems were held to a minimum mainly because of the presence of the additional adults.
It seems that the only solution that the School Board can visualize helping the low schools is to spend more money where it does no good: at the top.
The administrative office is already overloaded with supervisory personnel. There are already management personnel in the administration (before these new ones were hired) whose jobs are to visit the schools and help the teachers with their methods and curriculum. These are called facilitators. Most teachers cannot identify their facilitator because they have never seen or met them. What to the facilitators do all day? (Personal errands, I've heard.)
If a supervisor is to enter the schools, he or she needs to be in direct contact with the individual teachers rather than only discussing the situations with the school administrator. It is possible for individual school administrators to have their own agendas correlating with possible personality conflicts with individual teachers.
Maybe Superintendent Tony Authement needs to look at all individual schools where there have been an unusual number of staff turnovers and see if the problem just might be with administrative methods. One school of which I know has had 21 good staff members run off since their current principal took over four years ago.
A teacher aide in every one of the lower-performing classrooms would get greater results than having a new supervisor occasionally visit the schools with the sole intent of weeding out good teachers with whom the principal might have a conflict.
Letters to the editor are welcome.