My head is spinning this morning and I’m not sure how to get
it to stop. My wife suggested this, so I’ll give it a shot. We’ll see if I can
calm it down by trying to get it all on paper.
At the July 28 Beaumont ISD School Board Meeting, Dr. Kimber
Knight got the dubious honor of presenting our district’s 2014 state assessment
scores to the newly-installed Board of Managers. As former Trustee Mike Neil
recounted in a post on Facebook last week and again in this morning’s Beaumont Enterprise, the scores were not
met with the blindness, the support for the façade that “all is well”, with
which hard truths were met by our former Board of Trustees. It almost seemed as
if Dr. Knight’s presentation had been prepared in anticipation of the reactions
proffered by the old board; she used language designed to suggest that the
district wasn’t doing as poorly as the numbers suggested. Then a shocking
moment occurred. The board broke from the traditions fostered by their
predecessors and demanded the unvarnished truth.
This moment was refreshing to every stakeholder who cares
about the future of our school district. Dr. Knight, especially, as Neil
pointed out in his column, seemed relieved to be able to report the facts and
let the board and the public draw their own conclusions. Truth was finally
having its day in the Board Room of the Beaumont Independent School District,
and while the numbers constitute myriad hard, hard truths, only the unmitigated
acceptance of those truths will allow us to move forward in a positive
direction and repair the damage left behind by our district’s former
leadership.
But then, I read the
editorial leading off the Opinions section this morning, and the room began
to tilt toward the surreal, and something out of a Serling-esque nightmare fell
over the situation. The Enterprise’s Editorial Board writes this
morning that the value of our Board of Managers has been proven, exemplified by
the managers’ ability to reduce the number of teacher layoffs in our district
from the 221 teachers on the original Reduction in Force (RIF) list to less
than 10. I shook my head at this little white lie and continued reading as the
wall beyond the news sheet continued to slide askew.
When I got to the following line, though, whether through
indignation, disbelief, or some other rejection, I could barely continue
reading further: And if dozens of
teachers had been laid off, the remaining educators would have had to deal with
much larger class sizes, in some cases almost 30 students. This statement
cannot remain in the collective mind of our city. This statement is a land mine
waiting to blow unrest and division wide open once again destroying the fragile
harmony of which Neil spoke in his letter. It is a lie, and if the citizens of
this city believe it, they will have a rude awakening on the first day of
school.
See, there was another moment during the July 28 Board
meeting that some described as comical, some with only knee-jerk consideration
attributed to the failing of the speaker, and others recognized as just a
complete failure to communicate. The Board of Managers asked Dr. Dwaine Augustine
to give them exact numbers describing the state of our district’s teachers and
the RIF. Dr. Augustine tried very hard to explain several times and in several
different ways what it took many of us – the teachers impacted by and
potentially impacted by the RIF – several attempts to understand completely
ourselves. It seems that the editors of the Enterprise
are still working to understand it, too.
The RIF happened.
The Board of Trustees refused to vote, the Board of Managers
weren’t installed in time to stop it, the Conservator did nothing, and the RIF
still happened. It is important that we all start the school year knowing this.
Let me try to do for the editors what Dr. Augustine worked
so hard to do for the Board last Monday night.
When the former Board of Trustees voted to approve the list of
“affected areas” during the first stage of the RIF process, they eliminated
teaching positions. Those positions are gone. That means that if there used to
be three teachers in your child’s school to teach the 300 children in your
child’s grade, each teacher had about 100 students to teach over the course of
his or her six class periods. That works out to an average of about seventeen
kids per class, an extremely manageable group of children. If one of those
three teaching positions was RIFd by virtue of being in an “affected area”,
however, those 300 kids will now be divided up between the two remaining
teaching positions raising that average class size to twenty-five. Now that is
a substantial increase when we talk about things like student engagement,
classroom management, and discipline. And when we consider that this is an
average, understand that some classes will remain manageable at twenty students
or less while other classes rise to thirty or more.
That part of the RIF happened. There will be 221
fewer teaching positions in our district this year than there were last year. That
means that, through whatever mechanisms converged to bring it to pass, we will
have 221 fewer teachers this school year. That is what Dr. Augustine was trying
to explain to the Board of Managers. The only reason that this Board of
Managers is facing a teacher RIF list of fewer than ten teachers is that so
many teachers – good, strong, rock-solid teachers – fled from the uncertainty
that loomed over the district last spring and throughout the summer. They
retired. They transferred to other districts. They left education behind and
moved into industry. They decided that the headache wasn’t worth the
compensation and went home to tighten the family’s finances and find a way to
make it on a single income. They said in gigantic numbers (more than 200 of
them, in fact), “Enough is enough. We’ve had it. We’re leaving.”
The old Board frightened so many educators with their gross dereliction
and ineptitude that those teachers and administrators sought greener pastures,
security, and sanity rather than stay behind and live by a roll of the dice.
Now, I sing the praises daily of our state’s Commissioner of
Education, our new Board of Managers, and our new Superintendent. I’m glad that
they’ve all stepped up to face a nearly impossible task and are approaching it
with the kind of grit and integrity that will be its only solution. But I
cannot abide by our city’s newspaper and its Editorial Board engaging in the
same kind of obfuscation and sugar-coating that were hallmarks of our former
leadership whether they’ve done so through ignorance or intention.
At the end of this month, in nearly every classroom in our
city, our children will walk into larger classes than they ever have before. We
will need to come together as a community and support our teachers and our
administrators and the students and families they serve, as together we weather
the storm wrought by the ignorance, insolence, and pride of our district’s
former leadership. We will need to support our volunteer Board of Managers and
not turn on them when we discover that the promise woven into this morning’s
editorial was broken long ago and will not come to pass for months or years to
come.
