Open Thread: How is the Economy Affecting Your School?
Published February 14, 2009 @ 06:53AM PT
Have a story to share about how the economy is affecting you, your job, your studies, your school?
Image by Mike Licht
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Comments (11)
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Author
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Clay is an American high school Humanities teacher, technology coach, and Apple Distinguished Educator who has taught for the last eight years in Asian international schools. According to law, he's married to his wife. According to his wife, he's married to his Mac.
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It is upon us. From benefits, to staff positions, to raises - all have come under the red pen in one way or another.
I will still be able to do my job well, but - for example - we won't be publishing on paper as much as we have been in the past as the department budget is smaller. Morale is in the toilet as Admin is asking us to defer some compensation at the same time a capital campaign is getting ready to open the new arts wing. The symbolic collision of this space with the knowledge that people lost jobs is tough to reconcile.
Posted by Kate Tabor on 02/14/2009 @ 10:15AM PT
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I'm glad you've still got a job, Kate.
Any talk of how the Recovery Act will or will not help, sooner or later?
Posted by Clay Burell on 02/15/2009 @ 02:32PM PT
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I'm very happy to still be employed, and the Recovery Act will help us only to the extent that parents can continue to afford tuition and the markets bounce back. No endowment looks like it did 1 year ago. My biggest concern for us as educators is that market forces will push our curriculum to align more closely with the other college prep independent schools and that the freedom we have in our classrooms will slowly erode as we vie for the tuition dollar out there. We still cling to the appellation "progressive" but as more parents want their tuition dollars to guarantee their children a place at a highly selective college, we are going to feel some heat here, I predict.
Posted by Kate Tabor on 02/15/2009 @ 04:30PM PT
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Posted by inetrekla inetrekla on 10/31/2009 @ 08:28PM PT
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I bought my 9 year old nephew a shellfish license yesterday, and we harvested oysters as the sun was setting on the bay.
We'll eat them today.
That's a lifeskill worth learning when the "economy" tanks.
Posted by Michael Doyle on 02/15/2009 @ 06:22AM PT
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And I am teaching my daughters how to plant and grow their own food, prepare it to eat or store, read and think for themselves, and laugh so hard they cry. Also real lifeskills. No oysters in Lake Michigan, sadly, but we will enjoy them vicariously.
Now, if only the city let me keep chickens...
Posted by Kate Tabor on 02/15/2009 @ 06:59AM PT
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Michael, have you read Cormac McCarthy's _The Road_? Not one of his greatest, but somehow your comment brought it to mind.
Posted by Clay Burell on 02/15/2009 @ 02:33PM PT
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Clay, I have not, but peeked at teh reviews, and cringed a bit.
I think it's a sad sign of our culture that it takes the (real) threat of an apocalypse to remember what matters.
There is joy in harvesting, in creating, in much of what is now labeled drudgery.
My nephew and I enjoyed those oysters, and you can't get them any fresher. He learned a little bit more about tides, how cold the February Delaware Bay is (he tried to wander in), and quietly wrestled with the idea of eating what we killed.
Even if magical thinking worked and the economy recovers through further exploitive extraction of magically ever renewable resources, even if simple fusion becomes a reliable source of boundless energy (and the Easter bunny leaves me chocolate eggs), I'd still teach my children how to harvest.
We're human. Really. You could look it up.
And I prefer to raise humans to whatever critter we're pretending to be at the elite levels.
Posted by Michael Doyle on 02/16/2009 @ 01:16PM PT
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Hiring was frozen in November--there will be no new teacher hires even to replace people who leave, and most schools in the county are losing 4-10 positions. Supposedly this will only increase our class sizes by 1 student, but they failed to take into account that by getting rid of someone who only teaches geography it will hit all the other geography teachers and not the world history or US history teachers. (This is happening my department, but I know the same problem is going to affect all the other high school deparments that are losing people.)
Pay scales? Frozen. No step increase or even COLA for next year, plus all health care increases are being passed straight to employees.
We're being warned now to hoard the paper that we were given for this year because "no one knows how much money there will be for supplies next year".
Next year there will be no after school activity buses. We're pretty sure that it's going to destroy a couple of the sports teams, and at the high schools in the more rural areas of the county we're wondering if they'll have anyone on the sports teams at all.
Every week it seems, we get a new email from the superintendent about the budget crisis.
Posted by Penelope M on 02/15/2009 @ 10:50AM PT
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You're in VA, right Penelope? Rural?
Posted by Clay Burell on 02/15/2009 @ 02:34PM PT
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Virginia, yes. Rural, sort of. The county was thoroughly rural 15-20 years ago, but most of it has suburbanized since with growth spreading from the nearby historical city. (You can't develop in town much, between the historical district and the surrounding river, so all the new developments and stores went up to the west in our county and the one above us.) The southwestern chunk is still more rural, at least in the density of population.
Posted by Penelope M on 02/15/2009 @ 03:53PM PT
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