Big Sky Cairn

Editor’s Note: This is a comment posted by “Parent” on the post Teachers Get Four-Day Work Week. I promoted it to a stand-alone post because it describes the problems with this decision as well as the process by which the school came to its decision. I added the paragraph breaks to avoid the great wall-of-text.

As a Bridger parent, and a stay at home mother who daycare will not be an issue for, I am saddened that our administraion implemented this.

They are not doing it to save money, they say they are doing it for more uninterrupted class time. The athletes are tired because of games on school nights, they have to leave school for various things such as ski days, ad sales for annual staff, they will “try” to get these scheduled on Thursday nights, Fridays and Saturdays. It is really sad that we decided to cut our education time, and they did, so the kids who play sports are not tired at school.

As a parent I guess i feel it is my job to decide if my children should be allowed to participate in extracurricular activities if they are interfering with their education. The athletic director said that sometimes practices keep the kids at school till 9:30. Bridger town cufew is 9:00.

Bridger decided to add 30 minutes a day, or 2 hours a week, or 5 minutes a class period, to make up for a 6 hour Friday that will be missed. You see they figured that since they were already above what the state requires for hours they could cut hours and still meet state guidelines. Sadly, Bridger is rated on sites like Schooldigger, Great Schools, and the test scores straight from OPI, pretty poorly. There are small town near us that consistently score better. Which does give us that option, DRIVE THEM TO ANOTHER TOWN, possibly pay out of district tuition, but I am weighing that option.

This is my childrens education and I don’t take it lightly. I wish the administration took it as seriously. I would love to have my kids home 3 days a week, it would be much easier for me, but this is not about me. It is sad that the administration feels that what is best for them should be put before what is best for the children. I want my kids to have every opportunity to follow their dreams, whatever they may be, and I believe education is the key to that.

We were told that some teachers brought this idea to the superintendent this spring, and it was voted in this spring!! They sent a little brochure in the kids backpack saying they were going to have a “parent informational ” meeting 5 days later. When we got to the meeting the school board was prepared to vote on it THAT NIGHT. They decided to hold off on the vote for another meeting 2 weeks later. They got the majority of parents on board by saying they will try it this year, and if it doesn’t work they will discuss going back to 5 days next year. One school board member said she didn’t feel we were ready to do this yet, that it would be hard to swallow if it failed but she would vote yes to pass it so that we didn’t lose momentum. The superintendent didn’t know much about it, he actually couldn’t answer what other school was doing it in Montana , he said he thinks it’s Victor, well it’s one of those towns up there. They jumped into this without any plan as to how. If you go to Custer County Schools in South Dakota’s website, they have an implemantation and evaluation plan, which highlights things we didn’t even consider, they sent out questionares to community members,they made sure they had their ducks in a row BEFORE they ,as our administration put it, “gave it a try. We recieved one brochure, two school year schedules,and 3 hours of discussion, 2 of which were on how the sports schedule would help the tired athletes.

The superintendent actually got flustered over a comment made on how it seems like it was for the teachers. He basically said it was for the teachers, since we couldn’t afford to pay them as much as Wyoming, or other towns in Montana, that this would help us keep teachers, and get more teachers to apply at our school. So we will have teachers come teach our kids so that they can have Fridays off. There is such thing as a teacher who puts learning first, they are the ones I want to hear from, ones that do not stand to benefit from this but would give their honest opinion, not as to how great it would be for them, but as to what this means to education.

Hey Wiley-

This still doesn’t address some of the questions you left unanswered in the comment thread of your other post. Your disdain for public education permeates that comment thread, as does your disdain for educators. This parent has some legitimate points, but the number one issue is still funding. If the school district feels it needs to do this for teacher recruitment, it’s because they’re having trouble hiring teachers at $22,000 a year to start (go figure). The problem with your complaining about this is that you don’t give two shits about the root of the problem (did I mention that it’s FUNDING?).

Your solution is…. what… start a private school in Bridger? Brilliant idea.

Anyways, this is your precious market at work. All things being equal, Bridger would have absolutely no trouble hiring teachers. But all things are not equal, and it would be foolishness to assume that they were. Bridger is a small town that’s not in convenient driving distance of any bigger towns, and any teacher in their right mind will move to a bigger city with better pay to teach students the same subject matter.

So if this deal really is for teacher recruitment (I’m sure they’re saving a boatload of money too…) than it’s a matter of leveling the playing field with places that have more convenient location AND better pay. That’s the market, man. Isn’t it a beautiful thing?

Anyways, I’m in the process of looking for a teaching job in Oregon, so as you can imagine I have a little knowledge in this subject area. It would be economic suicide for me to stay in Montana to teach. Most of us College kids are graduating with upwards of $20,000 in student loan debt, you know. And if you think we can take care of that with the paltry salary that teachers in Montana make, than you’ve got another thing coming. School districts HAVE to find other ways to make us want to stay.

But who am I kidding? You don’t give a shit how much the people teaching your kids are making. You just enjoy complaining about the results.

Steve–

Maybe you should go on down to Bridger and tell those folks why they need to pay more taxes..

I mean, they’ve all got cash just lying around doing nothing, after all.

Stop by Fromberg, and let them know, too.

Did you read anything I wrote, Craig? I am constantly amazed at how simple things are for you guys.

You guys don’t want to pay taxes to educate your children. That’s all well and good. You’ve got your priorities, other people have theirs.

Just don’t sit around and bitch about the results. Aside from the fact that you don’t know what you’re talking about, it makes you look like hypocrites.

And Craig, you should know that when I say “you don’t know what you’re talking about,” I am specifically referring to the fact that you believe that Special Education teachers duct-taping their kids to chairs is some kind of regular occurance, despite the fact that (I’m going out on a limb here) you don’t know a single Special Education teacher.

Dammit, I meant the post where you referred to the kid getting voted out of his Special Ed classroom and informed us that this kind of thing happens all the time…

I mix up my anti-public education tripe at times.

But it matters not, it’s not like you’re going to respond to anything specific. That would be against your nature.

Wow. Looks like Steve T is spouting off on his dad’s talking points.

Color me surprise.

He’s still young, Craig. One of these days he might actually get a clue. Until then he sounds like little Mark T Jr.

I’ll keep spouting off the same stuff until someone tries to respond to it, Cordelia. Wiley’s ability to start a debate seems to be pretty good, he just doesn’t want to participate in it.

And Craig’s reading skills were just off yesterday.

Steve, you may be sensing my disdain for government programs and entitled government employees. Some of that inevitably rubs off on teachers, whom, I realize share a sacred station in American society above criticism right up there with firefighters and soldiers.

To answer your questions I have no idea what the financial situation is in the Bridger Montana school district. That is to say, I don’t know how much they take in or how much they spend. I haven’t seen their books, met their teachers, reviewed their organizational structures. I’m sure if I had more information, I could find a way to tighten the belt that doesn’t involve a 4-day school week.

My problem is with this specific approach made by this specific school board. I think the 4-day school week is hopelessly out of touch with the rest of the 5-day work week world. I think that the people of Montana didn’t vote to raise their own taxes so the school is just finding a way to defer expenses to those same people - no one’s saving money, in fact, the 4-day school week is more expensive. it’s just money being spent by someone else, and that’s a cop-out.

Oh, and if you want more money… Brad had a great idea in the last thread. Let’s develop our tremendous resource base in Montana - mostly coal - and use the revenues to fund education statewide.

Wiley-

You do have a point with your last sentence. Wyoming starts their teachers out above $40,000 a year even if they have no experience simply because of the oil wealth in their state (I believe they don’t pay a state income tax there either…)

But as you can imagine, that comes with its own problems, ones that I’m not necessarily in favor of dealing with up here. But it’s still good place to draw the line of disagreement between us, because I think we both have the best interests of the state in mind.

I really don’t understand the reflexive aversion of environmentalists to the harvesting of resources - everywhere. No one really wants to wreck the Grand Canyon or set up drills in Yellowstone - and if they do, they are way out of the mainstream. But the days of strip mining where the land is left torn and ugly are long past (at least in the United States). The ecological footprint of such exploration and production is minimal - and no energy company will get away with acting in bad faith with the level of watch-dog attention they receive.

It’s just so frustrating because drilling, mining - harvesting our own resources - has so many benefits.