I just read in the newspaper how the Oklahoma $3K teacher pay raise has affected schools. Apparently, the government didn’t give any new money for this pay raise; they only mandated that teachers get paid more, thus reallocating money the schools had for other things such as classroom material or maintenance, etc. Now the schools are facing the need to hire less teachers because of payroll restrictions, creating bigger class sizes (James' class already has 27 Kindergarteners in it), or cutting programs that are not essential (P.E., art, and music usually come first if the school even has the money for those in the first place). Just like the cool sounding name of No Child Left Behind, this new OK law giving teachers a pay raise is misleading. And after all those years of fighting for that payraise! It puts schools between a rock and a hard place.
Other news:
I asked Rex if his teacher is still saying horribly mean things to the students and he said he hadn’t heard any lately, but she says rude things to him or about him. When a kid was talking back to her, she said to the kid, “You can talk to Mr. Roberts that way, but you can’t talk to ME like that.” Rex was upset and wanted to say “No, you can’t talk to ME that way either.”
They had an IEP meeting yesterday and his mentor-teacher told Rex not to say anything. But when the specialists asked them direct questions about the child, his mentor-teacher said she didn’t know so Rex jumped in and said what he observed. This info was very helpful in the meeting, but his teacher shushed him a few times. He said the only person who made him uncomfortable in the meeting was the teacher herself. She still treats him like he’s a nobody who has no right to be at a school doing what teachers do. My opinion is that she’s simply intimidated by how good he is at the job that she is so lousy at.
Rex has to stay late at school every day grading papers and stuff. While this might not be so surprising, Rex is very annoyed that he is also doing things that are still his mentor-teacher's responsibility. He also said that she disappears for hours on end during class time and one time he needed her to tell him where something was in the classroom but she was nowhere to be found.
On my Penny Pincher’s website, I saw a link to a promotion for teachers: send in 15 SunnyD UPCs and get 30 scholastic books; send in 15 more UPCs and get $250 (while supplies last). I showed it to Rex and asked if Mr. Hinkle would like to go halves on it with him, seeing as you have to actually be a teacher. He was really excited about it and said his mentor-teacher would probably like to do it. So he showed it to her but didn’t say that he wanted part of it himself, nor did he tell her we were going to provide the UPCs. I didn’t know he withheld that part of the plan until after I bought all those SunnyD bottles ($30 in food stamps) and cut out the UPCs. I was a bit upset, but Rex said she’d probably think him too presumptuous that he, who was not even a teacher, would ask her to give him some of the profit (even though she wouldn’t have known about it at all if not for him). (You'll like this part, Mom:) He said that it would serve him better as a form of turning the other cheek. If he gave her this as a gift without expecting anything in return, then maybe she’d treat him better or at least say something nice about him on the evaluation form she got from one of the schools we’ve applied to. When he brought in the UPCs, all she said was “thanks” in a tone that didn’t sound very thankful.
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