OPINION | EDITORIAL: News all bad from school

It was the annual report to the public, but it seemed to be more of a recitation of painful news.

Watson Chapel’s Assistant Superintendent Bill Tietz had the unenviable task of delivering the report which included such items as falling enrollment, parents who refuse to take calls from the district and the hope that teachers don’t desert the district in its time of need.

First the enrollment. Between last year and this, the district has lost 78 students. Some of those have transferred to other districts, and some are being home-schooled.

In other words, most of those missing from class have been accounted for, but some have not been, which follows a nationwide trend of missing students or “no shows” as they are called.

Because money follows students, the loss of those students in the district is going to cost it more than a half-million dollars in revenue from the state. That is an enormous amount of money for a district to have to subtract from its bottom line.

As for teacher pay, the average is the highest it’s been in four years. One might think that’s a good thing, but there is the other side of the coin. Because many teachers are at the top of the pay scale, they will no longer see those kinds of raises. Consequently, there is worry they will look for other jobs where they can still be rewarded for their additional years of service.

“Most of our staff is over; they’re topped out on the scales,” Tietz said. “One of these years, we are going to lose a tremendous amount of teachers.”

Another sad statistic was that 67 students in the Watson Chapel School District have been declared homeless, a figure that one administrator called “a high percentage.” We would suggest that one homeless student is too many. The “homeless” designation means those students are living in a shelter or with someone else. Either way, that is a very unfortunate situation for a young person to be in.

Another troubling part of the report was on the subject of parental involvement — or lack thereof. The district’s Kristy Sanders said that out of 1,134 students attending school virtually, 262 returned to on-site instruction. On the flip side, because students have to be quarantined, 150 of them went from on-site to virtual learning.

Sanders said the district has been trying its best to get in touch with those students through phone calls, emails and text messages but even that effort has been problematic. What Sanders and others discovered was that parents had blocked the calls or unsubscribed from other forms of communication from the district.

“This situation has really frustrated teachers who are struggling,” said Superintendent Jerry Guess. “They are working so hard to get these virtual kids to do what they need to be doing and they’re just not responding as we would like them to.”

Yes, there is much in the report to be frustrated about. Teachers, administrators, parents and students — everyone is frustrated. And far be it from us to offer a snappy answer for how the picture could be better. It just seems that of all the work-arounds we have created in life to both get a job done and stay safe, education doesn’t lend itself to such alterations.

We admire in advance those who get through this year and look back at the progress that has been made. Those stories, it seems, are going to be few and far between.

Upcoming Events