Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Parents who expected to pick their elementary school students up at the normal afternoon release time Wednesday discovered that a plan to replace early release with a P.E. class never materialized.
The idea was killed last summer by the teacher’s union, district officials said.
“(Teachers) feel their Wednesday afternoons are too valuable to them in an opportunity to work together and plan,” Superintendent Larry Horton said. “When we asked them, they weren’t interested in giving up early release days.”
The early release schedule began in March of 2006 after the union approved a three-year contract that will run through 2008. The contract shortened Wednesdays in grade schools by 45 minutes to allow elementary teachers preparation time. The total time over the course of the school year comes out to about nine hours, Horton said.
During the preparation of the 2007-08 budget, district administrators proposed and the district Budget Committee approved a plan to hire two specialists to run a district-wide physical education program to give students quality physical education and to allow a full day on Wednesdays, with elementary teachers receiving their prep time when the specialists take the students for physical education.
The arrangement drew complaints from parents last year, who said they hadn’t had a chance to voice their opinions on the issue before the district made the agreement.
Dan Swanson, a Crawfordsville teacher who is president of the Sweet Home Education Association, the teacher’s union, said that his union members, while interested in having music and P.E. specialists in the district, were not eager to give up the time they say is valuable for collaborating with other teachers and preparing for their classes.
Swanson said the early release had its roots in state requirements issued about 10 years ago that put heavy record-keeping and grading responsibilities on teachers.
“We needed more time,” he said. “We really did. We couldn’t do what we wanted to in the time we had, even if we worked after school hours.”
The district and the teachers agreed to about a dozen early-release days initially, when students would be released at noon. The number of days later dropped to about eight, he said.
Then, in 2005, the district suggested making the release days a regular weekly part of the schedule, releasing students 45 minutes early on Wednesdays.
“We said, ‘Well, let’s give it a try and see how it works,'” Swanson said. “It seemed to work.”
But when the district proposed giving the teachers weekly release time while their students were being taught P.E., union members balked. The problem, Swanson said, was that the release time would not be the same for all the teachers, which defeats one purpose of the early release – giving teachers time to work together.
He said teachers were concerned about wording in the proposal that indicated to them that they would need to be involved in the classes taught by the specialists.
“One thing that came back to me very strongly is that we need that time,” he said of the teachers’ responses. “It’s the only guaranteed time when we don’t have meetings scheduled. It’s the only assured time when we can collaborate together.”
When told of that concern, Horton said that there was never any intention of taking away teachers’ prep time.
“I don’t know where they got that idea,” he said.
Horton said that, in response to direction from the board, he is working with administrators to develop a “sustainable” physical education and music program for the elementary schools. The two specialists positions were approved by the board in this year’s budget – about $90,000, Horton said.
“The board wants to see music as well as P.E.,” he said. “”What they want us to do is look at re-emphasizing, coming up with a quality music and quality physical education program for the elementary kids.”
He said the challenge he and administrators face over the next year is “how do you come up with a quality music program with one specialist and 1,000 kids?”
Swanson said he believes teachers would enthusiastically support having a full-time music teacher available to teach the younger students. But, he said, a big issue is what part of the day that would happen.
“A number of the teachers have told me that the whole idea of specialized teachers is not really related to the early release issue,” he said. “We don’t feel like we’re holding the district back at all in providing music and P.E. teachers.”