Our school provided several hours of professional development this week. I ended the week with mixed feelings.
Hopeful because our principal & their faculty cares. We want to make our school a good place for our students & ourselves.
Sad because we are employed by a school system so paralytically mired in bureaucracy that any of the potential improvements we identified as a staff won’t happen without a miracle or a revolution.
My colleagues and I got to engage in some cool, mostly positive conversations. At times, the atmosphere even felt focused on us by us.
Unfortunately, teachers lack the ability to implement the simple solutions we focused on, and so does our principal.
In one meeting, I learned my colleague & their students developed a working “panic button” that each staff member could carry to immediately activate a 911 call. Obviously this panic button system could quickly mitigate a life-threatening situation like an armed teenager with mass murder on his mind. Our City’s Public Schools - like every city’s - would benefit from such a powerful weapon of protection.
According to the colleague, the system is simple to set up. They & their students had used the same method to fix our schools’ disabled digital clocks over a decade ago. They simply piggybacked on the guest WiFi network, and for the first time in years, each classroom selected for the trial run had a working clock.
When OCPS upgraded the WiFi, we lost our working clocks. However, our then-principal also enjoyed knowing the time, so they allowed the colleague to re-establish the system. Another upgrade disconnected it. OCPS upgrades disconnected their third attempt, leaving faculty and students permanently clockless.
The panic button system feels like a really big deal.
Clocks? Fine. We learned. Not necessary.
Living? Necessary.
Since the Great Battle of We Deserve to Know the Time (Don’t We?), OCPS have more IT support stationed in each building.
Given the increased IT support and increased threat to our lives, should we dare to dream that OCPS eagerly adopts the panic button system?
During the same PD meeting, teachers held a lively discussion about the apparent redundancy of OCPS’s tardy & attendance policy.
Here’s the procedure teachers follow for unexcused tardies: each time a student is late without a note, we enter a code into the system’s electronic grading / attendance system. After that, we enter what’s called a minor incident report and submit it to one of our assistant principals.
On a separate system each teacher creates independently, we track tardies for ourselves. That’s how we know when to send notifications. At the nth unexcused tardy, we email the student’s parent, explaining the situation and the consequences if their child accrues another unexcused tardy. At the next unexcused tardy, we report it to the same assistant principal as a major incident, notify the parent their child was tardy again, & inform them we notified the assistant principal that the student had reached their nth tardy.
At that point, the assistant principal assigns the student to a day of lunch detention.
Repeat, repeat, repeat. Every student, every class, every day.
Teachers manage attendance basically the same way. Unlike tardies, though, it’s not just the district that cares about our records; the state also cares about attendance records. Schools have to report student attendance to the courts.
Furthermore, students automatically fail a course if they’ve accrued a certain number of absences. So add quite a bit of pressure to the personal record keeping, parent notification, and official documentation.
Repeat, repeat, repeat. Every student, every class, every day.
What about the system is redundant, though? It’s more than the hyper-fixation on those records & notifications and more than the documentation.
The redundancy exists because the electronic system we have to track tardies & attendance already notifies parents of absences and can notify them of tardies.
The fact that teachers are forced to perform any of these additional secretarial tasks wastes a massive amount of our careful attention every week. Not to mention the pervading, persistent anxiety we all carry of forgetting to record something.
On the receiving end of those notifications are the student’s parents. The parents receive robo-calls, emails, and personal calls. Oftentimes, a parent will receive a series of notifications for the same single event.
Schools have attendance offices. Can't attendance office staff bundle these issues by student and make one notification? At least that would spare the parents of the multiple notifications.
Not enough staff?
Consider moving administrative assistants from our central offices into the schools until the economy takes an upturn.
The redundancy of teachers’ record keeping lacks the life-saving element of the panic button, but that redundancy is still a big deal.
The unnecessary record keeping, documentation, and contacts keep us from focusing on our work: instruction.
Teachers lose the time and energy we need to develop quality and engaging long-term course work because we are constantly - and I mean constantly - distracted by short term requirements that the schools have an automatic system already completing.
Maybe it seems silly for the panic button and attendance / tardy procedures to stand out as evidence that school systems are unwilling to make changes that would drastically improve the quality of education their teachers deliver; however, both security and record keeping are major distractions for teachers.
OCPS seems earnest in their desire to retain teachers.
If they listen to us on these issues - allow panic buttons and stop making us relentlessly and redundantly document so we can create lessons - my god. Proof they are listening and proof they care.
Teachers are a loyal bunch. Imagine the result.
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