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By Michelle Gunderson.

This is the time of year when teachers start thinking about what the next school year will bring. We wonder what classes we will be given, what our students will be like, what joys and challenges we will face. Teaching is a profession that occupies the mind – teachers think about schooling and children constantly.

What we also wonder about is whether or not we will have the same teaching position. Will our lives be totally turned upside by being asked to teach something entirely new? This has happened to me several times in my career, and I can tell you that the first time teaching a new subject or grade you always feel like you are on shaky ground.

Stability. This is what I want for my students and my school community.

Yet, imagine what it is like teaching for the Chicago Public Schools. Instead of stability – we know nothing but chaos. Our chief of schools just stepped down under federal investigation, our principals are unsure if they will have enough money to run their schools next year, and we have a privatized janitorial contract that has left us teaching in filth.

I have always said that if you can’t stand change you shouldn’t teach for the Chicago Schools. Yet on top of the usual chaos in our lives, the Chicago Public Schools are asking educators to take a 7% pay cut. This is beyond change – it is adding insult to injury.

For years Chicago teachers have been holding our school system together with glue. Drastic budget cuts have meant no money for materials, cuts in programming, and educators being asked to shoulder more and more of the burden. Then we have had the largest amount of school closings in history where children and educators were completely uprooted.

The school closings injured our children the most. Every teacher I’ve spoken to from a “welcoming school” – the buildings where displaced children were sent – describes complete chaos. Teachers are trying to teach children who have been displaced from their communities with no additional counseling services or support personnel.

Our counselors, social workers, and psychologists are overwhelmed with paperwork and huge caseloads. Few of our schools have full time nurses. Yet our children continue to be injured physically and harmed mentally. Their needs never decrease no matter how austere the budget.

I look around my own classroom and realize that there are very few materials that I haven’t purchased or procured through grants or begging. The extensive classroom library, the math manipulatives, the educational toys – the tools of progressive teaching – all come from my commitment to students and love for this work.

This is the glue that is holding our system together. In classroom after classroom and school after school, teachers who go above and beyond in contributing their time, talent, and treasure to our children. Every day in our city counselors, social workers, psychologists, and nurses struggle under the weight of helping children put their lives together under the drastic circumstances our city presents them.

Not being able to attend to the needs of our students based on lack of resources and time injures our hearts. It beats us down in ways that are difficult to describe.

And every year we seem to be asked to do more with less, and less, and less.

So, what did I think when I heard the Chicago Public Schools administration proposed a 7% pay cut for educators? I was insulted. It was insult added to injury.

And then I said to myself, “Here we go again.”

Michelle Strater Gunderson is a 28 year teaching veteran who teaches first grade in the Chicago Public Schools. She is a doctoral student at Loyola University in Curriculum and Instruction.

Author

Anthony Cody

Anthony Cody worked in the high poverty schools of Oakland, California, for 24 years, 18 of them as a middle school science teacher. He was one of the organizers of the Save Our Schools March in Washington, DC in 2011 and he is a founding member of The Network for Public Education. A graduate of UC Berkeley and San Jose State University, he now lives in Mendocino County, California.

Comments

  1. Marian Hall Killian    

    This article articulates eloquently public school teachers’ profound economic commitment to the children of America as well as the economic sacrifices made by teachers across the country year after year……and now more than ever.

  2. Mahli    

    My colleague and I were discussing this very thing yesterday on our walk into school. We were each carrying bags of resources for our classroom, as we have done consistently throughout the year. I had boxes of crayons, markers, chalk, and paper. She had purchased some props for her students to use during their talent show performance…this is something we teachers do all the time for our students out of Iove and commitment to them. And now they offer to dock our pay 7 percent, raise our health care premiums, and deny us the right to clean schools. Shame on them.

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