Can We Look More Closely at Cuts?

By Katie Hadzor and CCAP leadership collaborators

What’s Happening Tonight?

In an effort to balance our budget, our Interim Superintendent, Dr. Dunlap, will be recommending some tough to swallow cuts at tonight’s board meeting.  CASD cut 45 positions, which means 33 furloughed professional teaching positions: eliminating elementary librarians, reducing staff at elementary, and reducing staff in all secondary content areas including more cuts in math and English.

We understand that we have to make cuts; our district is in a dire financial situation. However, let's look at some of the scenarios that need to be reviewed to determine if these cuts were in the best interest of our students, or if the school board should propose some adjustments to those decisions to best serve our students.

Position not impacted - Literacy Coaches

We currently have nine reading specialists, teachers who have specialized training to help struggling readers develop into better readers. The majority of the reading specialists in our district DO NOT WORK DIRECTLY WITH ANY WITH CHILDREN. (We know of exceptions of those who are still incorporating their traditional role.) These specialists are considered "literacy coaches."  While their job description didn’t change, the prior superintendent changed the focus of their duty to “literacy coaches.”  

As stated above most of our "Literacy Coaches" DO NOT work directly with children.  Literacy coaches “coach” the professional teachers on how to implement Lucy Calkins Units of Study, our current language arts program. (This will be discussed in a future blog post.) The literacy coaches duties generally look like this in our school:

• The literacy coaches attend sessions at Lucy Calkin's Teacher's College.
• The literacy coaches enter a teacher's classroom and model a ten- minute lesson. Roughly a week later, they return to the classroom to observe.
• They also coach teachers on how to have independent reading conferences with students. Yet, again, most do not interact with students; this is left to the classroom teacher.
• The literary coaches are also available for teachers to consult for book recommendations or ask for assistance with instructional practices.

This list leaves us wondering what else they are doing during the remaining hours in the week. The Literacy Coaches’ salaries are paid out of the Federal Title I funds, NOT out of the teacher salary matrix. 

So What Are Title I Funds?  

Title I is a 100% Federally funded supplemental education program that According to the U.S. Department of Education, "Title I provides financial assistance to local educational agencies (LEAs) and schools with high numbers or high percentages of children from low-income families to help ensure that all children meet challenging state academic standards." Title I programs are designed to help children meet the state content and performance standards in reading, language arts, and mathematics.

Food for Thought

We feel Title I funds should be spent in a way that will have a direct impact on our students. This brings us to some alternative money-saving measures for consideration:

• Return the literacy coaches to their reading specialist duties. Eliminate the contracted services and use the personnel we have to benefit our students. This matches our goal of all students reading on grade level by third grade as stated in the District's Comprehensive Plan. 
• Our reading and math scores have dropped since implementing the current model. (Math is heavily reading dependent.) The correlation to the programming changes (units of study) in addition to the shift in services to our struggling readers must be evaluated. (Again, a future post on Units of Study will evaluate this.)
• Retain the elementary librarian positions; school librarians matter.  These professionals incorporate not only the aspects of providing a library of books to entice a love of reading, and hence a building of reading skills, they also work directly with our students to teach skills. The elementary librarians are the primary instructors of research skills in the younger grades. They are the technology leaders for the elementary grades. Let's utilize their skills base and take the opportunity for students to have access to learn digital literacy skills needed for today. Our students need these skills as we embrace more STEM/ STEAM-based classes. 

Okay, CASD community - What are your thoughts? What did we miss? What else needs to be looked at? What can CASD do to best serve our students? As we know, these decisions have far-reaching consequences. Let's have a conversation!

Want to reach out to the board with your ideas or suggestions? vboardmeeting@casdschools.org