The Real Elephant in the Room

Wow! Another doosie of a week!  How 'bout that last board meeting? Tense right?  I thought Sherry Lancon was going to jump out of her seat and strangle a teacher. Intense!  And did you hear what Steve Christiansen said during the study session? I have it on good authority, he repeatedly referenced "the elephant in the room."

Awe, look at this cute little elephant we wish were in the room!

That elephant that he was referring to was the teacher raises and what they will cost the district.  The board has made many veiled (and not so veiled threats) that the end of times is coming to Pasco all because of the teacher raises.  Bus routes will be canceled. Para-educators will be fired. Music programs will be cut. Sports will end. The levy rate will have to increase. Bonds will fail. Schools will go un-built. And children will suffer, starve, and die all because those greedy teachers got a super-big-out-of-control raise.

As if this dooms-day blame game weren't bad enough, certain board members have even gone so far as to keep insisting the strike had NOTHING to do with curriculum and was really ALL about teacher pay.

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I'm going to go ahead and take a time out here while your head explodes.
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All done now? Ready?
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Okay, let's keep going.

The irony of Mr. Christensen's comment is that there really is an elephant in the room that they aren't talking about.

CURRICULUM!

DUH!

Meet Bob the Blue Curriculum Elephant. Bob would like to give a shout out to his special man, Steve C.

This new contract is expensive. It's true. I'm not going to say that paying teachers doesn't cost money, because you're not stupid. But what I am going to say is that we are spending a HUGE chunk of change on curriculum over the next two years as part of this contract. A REALLY huge chunk. Like "Sloth Loves Chunk" kind of a chunk. We will be spending far more than most districts spend on curriculum over the next two year period. If we're honest with ourselves, though, we all know why we need to spend so much on curriculum now. It's simply because PSD has failed to fund it for the past decade or more! 

Look at it this way, if PSD is a car, the teachers are the gas. We have to put gas in the car if we want it to go, that's just the way it is. And gas prices keep going up. That's just a fact of life. Curriculum is sort of like the engine oil here. And the situation we're in is like having to replace your engine because you didn't get the oil changed for more than ten years while driving the car 17,000 miles a month. It's really expensive to replace the engine but we didn't change the oil, so the engine seized up into a hunk of blackened metal and now the whole thing has gotta go. Now everyone inside the car has realized we are going nowhere fast, but they can't seem to decide what to do about it. Some people are griping about the cost of gas and still (STILL after all we've been through!) saying the engine is fine and we've got plenty of oil.  

This guy is wishing he would have adopted curriculum on a more regular basis, am I right?

Teacher salaries aren't as negotiable as they seem. We really have to pay a very similar wage to what the other local districts are paying if we want to keep teachers in our district.  So how do our numbers stack up?
Starting salary in Pasco is $38,997.  Starting salary in Richland is (not written as clearly as PSD's and therefor a little hard to calculate but my math tells me it's......) $38,339 per year.

Basically Pasco teachers make almost exactly the same as Richland's teachers. Except, of course, that the teachers around here for years have had to purchase their own classroom supplies and write their own elephants, er curriculum, so their comparative pay actually goes down...

So let's look at those numbers again. Are they that crazy? That over the top? About another 50 dollars a month per teacher which, let's face it, can be sucked up by glue sticks, pencils and white board markers pretty fast. Is this unreasonable? Actually, no. Teachers are in short supply, and high demand, so if we want to keep teachers around, we need to at least pay them what neighboring districts are paying. Especially if we want the good ones, the smart and capable ones, to stick around.

Now let's talk about the price of curriculum. Every year the district receives money from the state to pay for curriculum. Thousands and thousands of dollars, millions and millions of dollars meant for curriculum. Unfortunately they haven't been using that money for its correct purpose. I don't know what they actually have been spending that money on, but it wasn't curriculum. Now they even have a gigantic surplus of money sitting in the bank. Money that should have gone towards our children's education, but didn't. Money that was squirreled away for pet projects. Money that was spent on Saundra Hill's bonuses every year.

So how much is curriculum going to cost?

Nobody knows. Originally the board set aside one million dollars for curriculum and materials. But they later admitted that it was far too little money to be useful.  Realistically it shouldn't matter what it costs, should it? We are talking about a school here! If they don't have curriculum, what is the point!  Without curriculum, school ceases to be school! Teachers become highly educated babysitters. Is that what we want? Are our schools just a holding tank until graduation? NO. There is literally millions and millions of dollars sitting in "buckets" waiting to be spent on your child's education. Maybe not enough money to build a new school. Probably not enough money to build a Ferris Wheel in the parking lot of PHS. Not enough money to end world hunger. But DEFINITELY enough money to buy curriculum. We need curriculum and we need it now.  And we need to quit blaming teachers for the cost of running the district when it is poor central administration that has put us in this hole that we are in.

So let's talk about the real elephant in the room. Or maybe it would be more correct to say Let's talk about the elephant that's not in the room but should be!'

Let's get more of these elephants into our children's classrooms.

If you're one of the awful, greedy teachers who fought so hard to get the district to spend money on books for your students instead of just asking for a raise for yourself, please stand up and be counted.

Thank you teachers.