My 2 Cents, Part 2 - Unintended Consequences

So, last week was a rough week for teachers, especially those of us in Polk county. I decided to use this little blog of mine to help you understand some of the feelings that have been running through my head for the last week and to explain my perspective on some things. The opinions expressed here are absolutely positively MINE and if you don’t agree, well, that’s OK too. You are certainly entitled to be wrong! 😉 
sometimes things happen that no one intended.  In social studies, this is called “Unintended Consequences.’  According to Wikipedia,  these are “outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen.”  I think there were quite a few unintended consequences of some actions last week.  Will these turn out to be good or bad? We’ll have to wait and see.

Last week we got two robocalls from the Polk County School Board telling us that no matter how many teachers chose to attend the education rally in Tallahassee “school would continue as usual.”  I think the intended outcome was to reassure parents that their students would still be taught.   But, I think there were serious UNINTENDED outcomes.  First of all, the more you tell people basically, that you don’t need them, the more they may want to prove to you that you do.  We have been told that the numbers of staff members who took the personal day doubled and then tripled before Friday. Maybe if we hadn’t been told that our county really didn’t need us, so many people might not have decided “Well, prove it.”  BTW, anytime a student has a substitute teacher, it’s not a “normal school day.” 
I think another intended outcome of the robocalls was to try to get parents annoyed with teachers and to make staff who chose to take their personal day look bad.  No one will say that, but I feel like it was.  However, the unintended outcome was to make the School Board look bad for ignoring the rally, and TRYING to make staff look bad. Additionally, many, many parents kept their students home from school on Monday, which certainly made it easier for schools to continue with fewer staff.  If a school had half of its students out on Monday, it certainly explains why it was such a great day on Monday. 

The email that we got from the Department of Education, was intended to “inform teachers of the possible consequences of their actions” and “sent in the spirit of transparency. I think another intended outcome was to “scare” people into going to work, because contrary to whatever our robocalls actually said, school could NOT have continued with all of the people absent.  In this respect, it worked, Many, many people did cancel their personal leave and return to school. The unintended outcomes are ENORMOUS.  This “threatening to fire teachers” thing went viral. Forbes.com posted it.  Elizabeth Warren commented on it.  Monday in Tallahassee, EVERYONE there knew that we were threatened with being fired.  Parents, teachers, people all over the nation are angry. People in our county are angry. There is a petition asking for our superintended to be fired that has gathered over 5000 signatures. 

We got an email from the Superintendent of our county on the 15th.  You can read it here: https://www.facebook.com/polkcountypublicschools/?__tn__=%2Cd%2CP-R&eid=ARDrQqjajRw8fiWVuitbW1iA1AIxVf5-uM3eLKIGG0crLLfQbr50HBQI1SgZ9VmYuL_ddhNywaF8MtjY
The intended outcome was to smooth things over and explain how she’d like us to move on. Reading the comments, many people believe this is a genuine, heartfelt email.  Others, not so much.  One unintended outcome is more bitterness.   It says “The first thing I can do is apologize for the e-mail from the Florida Department of Education.”  Yes, yes, we all CAN apologize, but do we?  She didn’t, really. And  admitting you should apologize after the whole country has heard what you did and thinks you're mean for doing it.   Yeah, it doesn’t ring really genuine to me. For many, many people this is too little, too late.

As teachers, we know that we don’t always see fruit tomorrow from the seeds we plant today. We know how to wait.  We know that everything takes time – there ‘s very little instant gratification in teaching.  I saw a student once in high school who told me “Thank you” for wanting more from him than he was willing to give. He said he didn’t get why I fussed at him for being mediocre when he was clearly capable of so much more.  He said when he got to high school, he understood.    I don’t know if our rally in Tallahassee will make much difference. I  hope so, I certainly think that some people I know, now understand some things they didn’t before. Teachers are good at “wait and see.”  I guess when it comes to these events, we will just have to wait and see.  

My 2 Cents, Part 1

So, there’s been a little mess going on in my little corner of the world lately.  Let me catch you up and then I’ll give you my 2 cents.  Now, I understand that with ONE dollar bill and my opinion, you can get a Polar Pop at the Circle K, but this is my blog and I can say what I want, I think. 

The Florida Education Association, along with the local teacher unions in all 67 counties of Florida planned an educational rally. The purpose of the rally was to ask/plead/beg our legislators to do better for public education.   In case you live under a rock and don’t know, education funding in the state of Florida is dismal to say the very least.  I read a statistic the other day that says that Per Student spending in Florida is $1000 less than it was in 2007-2008.  I’m not sure that stat is correct, but it came from a reasonable source.  I can’t make up stuff like that. . .

We were told that the reason we didn’t get a raise this year is that the state didn’t give our district enough money.  When buildings need repair, we are sometimes told: “there’s not enough money.”  The reason my school has 23 bus routes but only 17 buses, meaning some buses do multiple runs, which makes kids wait for over an hour to even leave school is “There’s no money.”  We hear all the time that “There’s no money.” The state keeps coming up with new demands for us but doesn’t provide the funds to do those things.  All in all, our state would rather give money to private schools and charter schools than actually fund public education properly.  
 So, when the FEA says “let's get together and ask/plead/beg the legislators of Florida to do better for the children of the fastest-growing state in the nation, many of us said “Sure! Let’s do it.” Some of us agreed instantly, some took a little longer to decide.   I heard about this rally in September.  I thought about it, forgot about it, thought about it, forgot about it.  When we voted on our contract and heard from our district yet again, “There's no money” I decided to go but I flip-flopped back and forth and back and forth. 
 Our union got buses, you could sign up to ride the bus for free, but a group of my friends decided to ride together.  We were going to ride up, march around with our signs, get a good hamburger and ride home.  Those who decided to support the rally were required to take a personal day off of work.  There are rules and procedures about a personal day and we followed those rules.  (I’ll talk about THAT in Part 2!)  
After Christmas break, I realized I couldn’t flip flop any more and had to make a decision and stick with it. After much debate, I decided to go to the rally, so I did my stuff.  On Wednesday of last week, we got a robocall from the School Board telling us that there would be higher than usual teacher absences than usual on Monday but that school would continue as usual.  On Friday, we got the same call.
On Friday night, I was sitting at my house and my phone started absolutely BLOWING up.  I was getting messages from the entire world, it seemed like.  We got an email from our district, forwarding an email from the General Counsel from the Florida DOE, basically telling us that if we continued with our “Strike” we could be fired and our union could be fired up to $20,000. 
For a little while, I was absolutely terrified and felt like I was going to vomit.  My logical mind was telling me one thing, another part of my mind was telling me something different.  I had friends in various emotional states right along with me.  Most of us went from fear, stress, and eventually anger.
This led to an entire weekend of  “This, That and Whatever.”  The Blame Game, Backpedaling, Flip-Flopping, “Pin the Guilt on the ________” has been rampant. Quite frankly, it was mentally and emotionally exhausting.  These are the facts as I see them.  
Now, here’s my 2 cents.  In 25 1/2 years, I have SEEN the changes in public education – and it’s not good.  Education is changing and it’s not the fault of teachers. Teachers don’t make the rules about education – and the people who do make the rules are NOT education people.   Let's let people who don’t know anything about your job makes the rules for your job and see how well that goes. 
I went to Tallahassee, I wore my red shirt (and my red sneakers of course) and marched and held my sign.  Why did I do it?  Because I felt it was the right thing for me to do.  I have a niece who wants to be a teacher.  I want her career to be better than mine has been. She deserves better. Eventually, I hope my nephew gets to be a dad and my niece gets to be a mom.  Their children deserve better.  The 2000 children at my school deserve better. The children of my former students deserve better. 
Let me add this:  The people who stood up and marched didn’t do it lightly. We didn’t take our personal day for fun. We did it because we believed that what we were doing was the right thing to do. 
And this is where I’m going to lose some of you.  If you don’t work in a public school or have not ever worked in a public school with all due respect, you have no right to talk about the pressures of our job.  You don’t know what it’s like. I don’t care if you have been to school – that doesn’t make you an expert on my job.  I’ve sat in a dentist's chair, but that doesn’t mean I understand dentistry.  I’ve flown in airplanes, but I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to be a pilot  So unless you’ve done it, and done it for more than a day or a month or a year or 5, you don’t get it either.  Visiting a school,  delivering things to a school, even volunteering in a school doesn't make you an expert.   
I”m very grateful for my friends. I have a friend who got angry before I did – and he gave me more courage than I knew I had. While I felt like throwing up, he was already angry.  He never wavered in his conviction and I'm thankful to him for that.    I have other friends who shared their concerns with me, which made me examine my own feelings and the facts,  to be able to answer their questions and help calm their fears. 
This was an ugly situation and everybody had to make a choice. The same choice didn’t work for everybody and all of us had to do what we felt was the right thing for us.  I lost respect for some people but not for what they decided to do or not do.  I lost respect for those who attempted to bully, belittle or give people grief because “they” ( the nasty people) didn’t like the choice the other person made.  To give people grief for doing what they feel like is the right thing – shame on you.  Yes, I said it.  Shame on you!!   
I'm not nearly done, but I'm finished now.

PS - That sign at the top wasn't mine. I wish I'd thought of it.  I wish I'd put on the back of  mine "We are Polk - and we are NOT proud!"     

Mine looked like this: