School's Out Forever...

Four years ago my contract with the Ogden School District wasn't renewed because they needed to get rid of tons of teachers, and I was one of the new ones. I thought it was messed up, because I was one of the very few male teachers in the school, and one of three Hispanics members of the faculty, even though our student population was roughly 90% Mexican. Oh well, you know. It's not always about statistics, and I kind of wanted out of there anyway. It was a very tough school, one of the toughest in Utah. So much so that when I saw an opening a year ago and I asked my old coworkers to help me get back in, the common response from all of them was "What are you smoking?" Some of my students were just waiting to finish 9th grade so they could go drop out and join their gangs full time. What do you do with students like that? The nice thing about the job, though, was that it was in a district, which meant tenure, regular raises, good benefits, etc.

I worked for the last four years at a charter school. Charter schools are technically public schools. They're free to the public, they need to pass their end of level tests with a certain score in order to get full funding, etc. The only difference is that they don't get the same kind of funding, so, at least in the case of my school, there aren't free buses for the students, there's no lunch provided, there isn't any kind of deal with the union, and they are basically independently ran. And less money means smaller salaries for the teachers, crappier benefits, and a lot, and I mean, a lot of new teachers, either fresh out of college or working in their teaching degrees, which are cheaper and more willing to do any crappy job that may be thrown their way. But the school does well anyway because the kind of kid who can go to a charter school usually gets a lot of support at home and are a little more motivated. We have lots of kids who come from private schools or who were home schooled. Parents have to provide their own rides and a certain amount of service hour each year, even though it's impossible to enforce. And kids can be rid of easier. It's still probably not legal, but when they want someone out, they find a way. We had a couple of students a few years ago expelled because they drank alcohol during lunch. Not even a chance to prove themselves, just out. And one of them was a really good student, so it was a shame. So it's easier to prune the student population to make it closer to ideal. District schools could never do something like that. They need to teach everybody, and that can be tricky. But that's the topic for a completely new post, so we'll skip it for now.

Now, if students are easy to get rid of, teachers are basically expendable. I don't know about other charter schools, but in mine we sign ad-will contracts which clearly specify that we can let go without any kind of reason. We can also leave without any explanation, but it's always harder for teachers. For example, I've tried to leave the school since I started there, mostly because of the lack of job stability. To get a job in a different school requires a reference from the teacher's current principal, but requiring something like that in my school is seen as a lack of school pride, loyalty, etc. My old principal refused to give me a letter of recommendation and never answered the phone or called back when the district I was applying to called to ask about me. As a consequence I was never even considered for the job. My new principal wrote me a letter back when he was a vice-principal, but I have heard from other teachers that he didn't want to write letters for other teachers who were looking for jobs. Our current vice principal literally told one of the teachers, a man who's been in the school for about five years and who brought tons of awards, new students, a good name, and pride to the school, that she didn't know him well enough to write him a letter of recommendation. Ad-will contracts benefit employers a hundred times more than they benefit employees, mostly because employees don't know their full rights, and employers think that ad-will contracts give them the right to do whatever the hell they want and get away with it. I can't even recall the number of times that our ad-will employee status was brought up in faculty meetings when asked to do a specific task that wasn't very appealing or popular.

Now, going back to the vice principal saying she didn't know my friend: it's true. She didn't know him enough because she never did an observation. The administration is supposed to do two formal evaluations of every teacher in the school twice a year. I had one in four years. "Why, what slackerish principal you happen to have," you may say. True. Teachers, at least in my school, are not a priority, as long as test results are high and there are no parent complaints. But the bottom line is, administrators in charter schools are way overworked. In a charter school there is no district office with paid employees who take care of crap like getting subs, taking care of testing, training new teachers, keeping track of teacher and student progress, payroll, HR, etc. So the two people in the office have to do everything, and as a consequence a lot slips by and isn't taken care of. Just as  a way of example let me tell ya about my experience with this year's CRT's. CRT's are the end of level tests that students have to take on Math, Science, and English. They don't really affect the students at all, but they demonstrate to the powers that be if the school is doing its job and if it deserves the funding that the state so generously grant them. This year testing is finally being done completely online. But something is required, though: working computers. That is a problem for a school that doesn't get enough money. It requires a couple of computer labs, since testing has to be done quickly and three times (for the three core classes) for every student in the building, and somebody taking care of the computers at all times. My school has two computer labs, each accommodates a full class at any given time, which is close to enough as long for what we need as the computers work. But a few of mine died suddenly right before the test one day, leaving me with not enough computers for everybody during the upcoming class period. The vice principal told me that she was in charge of testing, and that she should be contacted in case of a mishap like one, so I did. The problem is that she was in a meeting at the time, and she told me that she was busy and that I should figure it out by myself. Had we had a proper testing specialist, as we were supposed to, this wouldn't had happened.

Anyway, I forgot what I was talking about... Oh, right. Overworked administrators. Without a supporting district, they, by themselves, have to deal with curriculum, testing, behavior issues, parent complaints, teacher training, teacher observations, contracts, shipping and receiving, supervising the janitorial people, EVERYTHING! Which, I understand, is stressful and overwhelming. Where does that leave a teacher in desperate need of administrative support? In the faculty room, venting to other teachers who are just as lost or in desperate need of help.

NOT ideal.

I realize, and I have to clarify this again, that this is my unique experience. I have a friend who used to work for us but moved to a new charter school. He said that, even though he's not getting a raise, again, he's at least happy because his principal cares about teacher satisfaction and makes decisions that make sense. I haven't seen one of those for a while in my school, though. Something else I need to clarify: I love teaching. Being in the classroom with the kids is my favorite part of the work day. I enjoy it tremendously, even if at times there are kids/classes that drive me crazy. It's all the politics around it that ruins it for me. That's why I prefer morning faculty meetings: After listening to all the bullshit that the administration has to say or all the crap they have to give us, I can go to the classroom, get a kick out of my classes and students, and forget all about it. I will miss the sassiness of the 7th graders, and the "suck-up-ness" of the 6th graders, and how they all made me crack up each day.

I'm moving on. I finally got a job at a district, which, as I mentioned above, means possible tenure, steady raises, better health benefits, 401K. The works. But I'm teaching a class that I've never taught before, and which I never even pictured myself doing. I'm not scared, though. I'm actually excited. But again, I'll miss taking to semi-adults on a daily basis.

Which takes me to the whole point of this entry. I've been asked me a couple of times, "Are you happy to be done with it? Are you sad?" And I'm not sure what to say. I'm sad because I'm going to miss my interaction with the kids. Most of the kids I had in that school were my students for two years, so I got to know them really well. I guess that after a few years I figured out how to be a somewhat popular teacher without being a pushover. I was fair and I expect students to do their best. An "A" in my class represented hard work, dedication, and care. A crappy job done on time was never enough. And students knew it. A few of them hated my guts for it, but a lot of them (which surprises me to this day, since I was kind of a loser in school) liked me. I guess it has to do with what John Cleese once said of Basil Fawlty, his character on Fawlty Towers, and I'm paraphrasing, "People like a funny character. They will cheer for him and appreciate him even if that character, like in the case of Basil, is a horrible person." I don't know if I'm a horrible person, but I did try to be funny. Teaching is a performance art of me, and if I didn't get a laugh when I intended it to, I felt like a failure. Tests results were a given, though. The kids were going to pass, despite us teachers (although my principal told me last year that the 78 or so percent my 6th graders got wasn't acceptable, even though it was pretty close to the state's average of 81%, and even though my 7th grade results were way above the state's average. Not to mentioned that I had had scores way above that the two previous years. Despite all that, he said that if the scores for ALL my classes didn't go up, I wouldn't be welcomed back. This year my scores were in the 90's for both my 6th and 7th classes, but I never heard a word about it).

I understand that teaching is a thankless job. People have no idea the amount of work that goes into planning a lesson, grading papers, into all the loads of paperwork we have to fill on top of that, and the sassiness and disrespect we get from students and parents. But when on top of that the administration only focuses on the negative, the work environment is pretty much unbearable.

At the end of this year I attended two meet-ups. One was in my new school and one was on my old one. My new school's meet-up was organized by the administration. They wanted the new teachers to be acquainted with the faculty, and for the old teachers to leave with a treat and a present, and to be thanked for their work. The teachers leaving cried, and the rest cried for them. My old job's one was organized by the teachers, and it was held at a restaurant. The administration wasn't there. The teachers leaving were stoked, and the teachers staying were resigned, hoping they could move on if only they could get a better paying job, or just a letter of recommendation from the principal. The difference was, of course, truly shocking.

My last day was happy, because I've been counting the days until I was done for the last month. That's how bad things got in the least year. They were bad the previous years. We had a principal accused of embezzlement in his old district and almost ended up in jail, and since then we had a principal with absolutely no experience in administration and with barely any experience as a teacher. But our new vice principal really made this year a living hell for everybody she didn't absolutely love. The last day, after kids came and gave me notes, presents, hugs (I know. That's probably illegal, but at that point I couldn't care less), and some even looked genuinely sad that I was leaving, I didn't even have a "goodbye" from the administration. I was there for four years. I worked my  butt off for that school. I volunteered to help wherever and whenever I could. I was the official and unofficial mentor for a bunch of the new teachers. I was the tech guy who would help everyone with their SmartBoards, computers, projectors, or whatever, when they needed it, since we didn't have anybody else who would do it. I even handed out cords and electronic supplies that I had bought with my own money. And I fixed all the 40 computers that they found in that forgotten closet, for free. After four years of that, I didn't even get a hand shake or a freaking word of thanks. I literally left the school and it was like I was never there.

School ended at 12:30 on Friday. As I left the school to meet the other teachers at the restaurant, I got a notification on my phone telling me that there was a problem logging in into my school email. They had closed it. All my emails were gone. The nice notes from parents, the reproaches and complaints from the administration. My students' good and crappy papers. And with it all the Google Docs they shared with me: their quizzes, essays, slideshow presentations, the movies they made in my class. Even my lesson videos I posted on YouTube. All gone. Again, as if I'd never even been there.

Am I sad? Happy? I don't know. I had absolutely no closure. At the end of every other year, in both schools, and even in the school where I student taught, we were asked to bring our computers and keys to our exit interviews, where we were told us if we had  a job the next school year or not (Most teachers who had one of those interviews this year are not coming back. The turnover every year in that school is so huge that no company would give them unemployment coverage), but this year they didn't even give an exit interview to the teachers who chose to leave. We simply had to leave our computers and keys in our mail boxes. I told myself that the fact that we didn't have to sign a paper saying that our things were actually returned made it so I didn't feel any kind of closure. But no, it wasn't that. It's the fact that I gave that school four years of my life and nobody had the courtesy to even shake my hand or at least to say "bye." Nothing. I walked out of the school as if I was going to come back the next day. But I'm not. I'm literally never going back there. And since my email account was closed, I probably will never receive a note from anybody either.

So what am I feeling then? I feel like I closed a very complicated book in the middle, a book that I loved and hated, a book that I couldn't wait to end but that I enjoyed tremendously at the same time, and just threw it away, wondering what would have happened next.