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Education

The Day Teachers Dread

How to kill morale: Every year tell your dedicated staff to get ready to be dumped or bumped.

Nick Smith 17 May 2010TheTyee.ca

Nick Smith is a veteran public school teacher who lives on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia. You can read his series Tyee reader-funded series "Teaching that Inspires" here.

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"I am just sick of having my head on the chopping block year after year," a fourth year teacher reveals to me after being bumped out of his position once again. "I just feel like finding a job that I don't really care about," he confesses.

This spring, as in most springs in recent memory, thousands of B.C. teachers, myself included, received letters from our school boards, warning us that we were in jeopardy of losing our jobs this coming fall. This past week, I found out, by phone, that I was spared the axe. The next morning I discovered that many of my colleagues were not so fortunate.

Every teacher I have spoken with has issues with how the "teacher placement process" works in our district on the Sunshine Coast. On a designated evening, all teachers in a district are required to sit by their phones. If the dreaded call comes, they have to do the unthinkable: indicate whose job they intend to take. The only two criteria are that the teacher doing the bumping is qualified for the position and has more seniority than the teacher being bumped.

One particularly committed teacher received such a call last week. This fellow has spent the past seven years developing a very successful alternative program in which he takes at-risk 11- to 14-year-olds through what might be the most crucial years of their lives. For many, he is their keystone, a solid male role-model to whom they are firmly attached.

Bumped out of his job, he does not know what the fall will bring. His long-term special education teaching assistant is retiring this June, so there might not be any continuity for his students next year.

Bumping and its harmful ripple effect

The reason for these deep cuts, we are told, is declining enrollment. Yet, according to the BCTF, elementary school enrollment is projected to level out next year, and to begin increasing thereafter.

We can't help but ask if this might be a good time for schools to take a much-needed breather and to take stock of where we are at and to plan for what is coming. Instead, we are shutting down schools and hacking school staff down to the bone, creating a sense of disaster.  

Here is why it is so destructive: For every position that is cut, a domino effect is unleashed, as one teacher bumps the next, creating a ripple throughout the whole district. In one case here, a teacher lost one block of his teaching load. He bumped someone below him who held a full-time position. This went down the line, through five schools in our district. We now have at least three teachers who have chosen positions that they do not intend to take on and whose own job is now owned by someone who is hoping to get their own job back. It is not only confusing, but absolutely demoralizing. In this particular chain of events, at least two teachers have taken time off for stress leave.

Students at one school distributed a petition to get their stressed-out teacher back, someone they have known since grade eight and whom they expected to see them through graduation this year.

Tearing apart staff cohesion

This process treats educators as though they are replaceable widgets, instead of caring professionals who have spent years developing programs and building relationships with students and their families.  

There are logical flaws in this system. A dedicated teacher who has spent 10 years building up a drama program while working half-time, can be bumped out of her position by a teacher from another school who has been teaching a mix of English and drama full-time for a little over five years.

I know that some people feel that the kind of job security that teachers have become accustomed to is a thing of the past. Fair enough. However, threatening half of the staff every year, followed by needless shuffling, demoralizes school communities in such a profound way that it is disrupting what we are trying to achieve in our schools. When teachers are pitted against one another because one has to take the others job or else default on his mortgage, it makes it impossible to build staff cohesion.

When teachers do not know where they will be from one year to the next, they do not invest their time and efforts into developing exciting programs that take years to build. When we only value teachers according to their seniority number, it robs students of the rich education to which they are entitled. It also robs newer teachers of what will likely be the most energetic phase of their careers. When teachers are forced to leave a job they love and to take one they do not want, it leads to resentment on all sides.

Ultimately, our students pay the biggest price, when they lose relationships with teachers whom they came to trust and rely upon.

The cost to students' feelings

In my career, I have left three schools, all of my own volition. The hardest part of a move is the betrayal that some students perceive. I remember a grade 11 student charging into my room, having just heard that I was moving on. With pleading eyes, she said, "But next year is grad. It's no fair. You were here for my brother's grad." Sometimes teachers have to pull up their roots and move on, but it is always with awareness of the hole left behind, the lost relationships with students and colleagues.

Good teaching has always required both parties to know each other. What are your strengths and weaknesses? What gets you upset? What are the rules here? These all take time to work out.

Ask anyone to tell you about a favourite teacher and chances are you will not hear about content learned or strategies deployed. You will hear about the teacher who played fun math games or the one who brought in cupcakes at Easter. The teachers who are remembered are those who forged healthy relationships with their students.

Perhaps those students who have strong adult connections in their lives will be only temporarily disrupted and will move on. It is our most fragile students who will fare poorly when all the dust has settled. It is the ones who do not trust easily who will just see one more adult walking out of their lives. They may never recover.

School board personnel may not be able to fit these relationships, these feelings, these social dynamics into a spreadsheet, but that does not mean that they do not count. Our students do count, and so do my colleagues. They certainly count to me.  [Tyee]

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