School District 55 teachers are proposing two days a month for early release in their next contract to help address the mountains of paperwork associated with benchmarks and state assessments.
“Elementary teachers feel strongly that we need time to do these kinds of things,” Sweet Home Education Association President Joyce Baugus said.
The current contract provides a committee of teachers and administrators who recommend a certain number of early release days to the board, which then decides how many early release days elementary teachers will get each year.
Students attend school half the day on early release days. Teachers must use that time on extra classroom work, such as the paperwork associated with state standards.
The early release applies to elementary teachers, who do not have prep time during the day. High school and junior high teachers have prep time during one period each day, although the district is proposing to end the prep period.
The district proposes eliminating the early release committee and simply building early release days into the calendar each year.
Every year, the state assessments add more to what teachers must do, Baugus said. Teachers spend hours every week documenting the progress their students are making.
Ten years ago, under the traditional school model, teachers had to deal with daily assignments and corrected them during special segments throughout the day when a class would go to music or the library.
Those extra programs have been lost to budget cuts over the years, Baugus said, so elementary teachers have lost the time they did have to handle much less paperwork.
Now, teachers need at least twice as many hours for paperwork as they did 10 years ago, Baugus said.
This year, elementary teachers had eight early release days, Baugus said, and that “really wasn’t enough.”
Next year, the early release committee proposed 10 days, with the idea that building administrators could use that time for in-service as well.
“Ideally, it would be nice to a half-day ever week or at least a couple hours every week,” Baugus said. “What happens if we don’t have it, we have teachers having to use a lot more of their own time.”
As it was and as it is, teachers spend hours working that they’re not paid for every week, Baugus said. They can do one of two things when they don’t have the time to do it all during their workday. They can choose not to do it, which is against the state mandate; or they can use their own time, which is already stretched to the limit, and cut into personal and family time.
“Teachers have always put in extra time, but I think it’s more now,” Baugus said. Teachers are in a salaried position, and they expect to put in some time during their off hours. They don’t expect to get into teaching for the money or without the expectation of extra hours.
“They do expect and are willing to put the time in, but in the last five to six years, we’ve been stretched beyond our capacity to keep going,” Baugus said. “Our district has exceptionally good report cards from the state. The biggest reason is because the teachers have put in extra time.”
To reward them by taking away what they already have “seems ridiculous,” Baugus said.
Early release days are among the teachers’ top priorities in the current contract negotiation, Baugus said. It has worked. “That time we have, teachers get a lot done.”
Uninterrupted, “I can get a lot done,” Baugus said. “I think for the most part it’s how teachers use it. I don’t see people in this building (Hawthorne) wasting their time.”