Another curious footnote to last night's meeting. In scouring the minutes I noticed an approval to pay JROTC instructors 1/200 of their salary for 21 days in July. I have no beef with the JROTC guys per se but I have to question why they are needed in July when the ostensible purpose of summer school is to get kids through courses they failed during the year. In my experience with the program when I was teaching high school their role was decidedly non academic and more of a social emotional component focusing on discipline and teamwork and etc. but I don't recall any of them teaching anything remotely geared to passing exams. One of the guys spent a good deal of his time taking cigarette breaks, working on his real estate deals and wooing a lonely female teacher on his floor. When the ingenious decision was made at the incessant urging of a certain wildly unpopular Speech Dept. Supervisor to cut Special Ed. teachers out of 1/200th summer duty, breaking the day in half and gutting things like community travel for low functioning kids, field trips for all the kids and forcing kids who need 12 month programming to adjust not to just one new teacher but now to two different teachers I had to wonder what the savings really were. And now that the district goes begging on Craig's list for summer school teachers and trolling the depths of rookies, burnouts and general hacks to fill the room with warm bodies I can't help but ask why do the JROTC people need to be in the buildings in summer if they aren't teaching Math, Science, English or Social Studies? Figuring an average salary of 50K for 21 days the city has coughed up nealry 32K to have these guys standing by. Why ?
Wonder why "the slasher," Barb Smith let this one through. She nitpicks when a program wants to purchase materials for classroom instruction. Why is this expense necessary?
ReplyDeleteMy question exactly. And if they really have work to do they can split it into 2 shifts and take the hourly which guarantees nobody makes more than 75 a day. After all that was the driving strategy to screw special ed kids out of having one teacher all day and splitting their program in half. I thought this was the third poorest city in the Milky Way, funny how we find exorborbitant fees for out of town experts who only have to be here for 25 days between now and New Year's and 30 Thousand plus for guys to hang around schools in their camo for July an August. Are they really doing security ? IS that the real purpose? Everyone knows the first week of summer school is a mixed martial arts festival.
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