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Friday, December 13, 2019

In Duval County it’s the beatings will continue until morale improves.

You know you can dislike the district for a number of different reasons.

Maybe a district staff person came through and complained you didn’t have some artifact on your wall and your principal instead of standing up for you or pointing out all your good work said, yeah, where is it.

Maybe you dislike the district because at some future point you may have to teach reading so now you are told to get 5 60 point reading classes, and you better get them quick and not expect any help or time to do so.

There are lots of reasons why “you” may hate the district but let me tell you mine.

As an ESE teacher I have to write IEPs long reports on my students, they are complicated and take hours to write. Well this year the district brought in a new program and its had glitch after glitch. It’s definitely a step down from what we had which quite frankly wasn’t that great.

Well the district told us earlier this week, that if we have to do an addendum to the IEP, adding something supplemental and what we generally do for all our students not aging out so they can attend the ESY, and the IEP was written on the new program before November, instead of doing an addendum, we had to do a completely new IEP, another glitch has prevented the program from being able to clone itself. This means I have three more IEPs to write and my neighbors have between 5 and 7.

One of my colleagues had finished their IEPs and only had the IEP addendums to do now has to rewrite all their IEPs.   

Reading back I don’t think my words are describing this debacle correctly. They have just added a ton of work to a lot of teachers.

Do they say, so sorry, omg we’ll keep trying to fix this, or anything approaching what a human with empathy would say. Nope, it’s just so sad to bad, get to work easily replaceable cogs.

It gets worse too. The district is spending wheel barrels full of money on this new program, while the state has an IEP program which is more streamlined (less work for teachers) and I am told its free. Wait what, free. Maybe if we used it we wouldn’t be trying to save nickels by under paying subs and bus drivers.  

I get it the state sucks, they really do, but time and time again when the state puts us in a hole it’s the ivory towers instinct to keep digging, and the staff are the ones given the shovels.  

You know under Pratt Dannals and Vitti communication with teachers and attempts to treat them as professionals weren’t priorities and a year and a half into Greene’s reign, I am starting to feel like, new boss same as the old boss. Nobody at the Ivory Tower ever seems to think, well how will this affect the staff or how can we help them.

When will the powers that be realize the better things are for teachers the better they will be for students, and if the district treats people like easily replaceable cogs, those cogs will find another machine, and most likely make more money there as well.

So yeah, what a Merry $%^#ing Christmas the district laid on its ESE teachers.

1 comment:

  1. Ah, my friend, you're catching on. I've felt like a cat rubbed the wrong way up its back since Greene arrived. Everyone wanted to circle their wagons around her because of the shabby treatment dished out over the sales referendum by the city council, but frankly, on a scale from Vitti to Willis, she is definitely on the Vitti side. This mind-boggling special kind of stupid where every day every teacher has to write out the standard in full on the white board, every admin has to walk into the classroom, read the standard, decide if what he/she sees aligns, interrogate the kids to see if they can explain it all ... mind boggling special kind of stupid. But this is what she did in Manatee. In fairness, in her last two emails to teachers, she didn't want us to do something. Before that, sandwiched between the compliments, was a desire for us to do something for her. As I said above, she tends to the Vitti end of the scale.

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