I see that the teachers unions are fighting against schools re-opening. Why are we paying teachers to not do their jobs? Any job I've ever had equated to no work, no pay.

If that's the case, then [in the case of public schools] would We the Taxpayers have an expectation of getting a rebate? Since we wouldn't be paying teachers who aren't actually going to work?

Not being argumentative, just sparking discussion....

Don’t get me started on this waste of taxpayer dollars. If they aren’t working then there should be no pay. Transition to online, my daughter is an English professor and all her classes are online.

Are they pushing back with the idea of no school at all or going to virtual/online learning? Two very different ideas. As a school board member, this has been a very difficult time. Trying to weigh the pros and cons of it all, while accounting for a decrease in funding from the state due to decreased revenue as a result of the shutdowns. We are also in an area where not everyone has internet access, or even a computer to have an avenue for online learning.
It is much easier for the upper grades to learn remotely, not so much for the younger children.
Definitely is an interesting and challenging time for everyone involved.

Long story but the short version is Louisville/Lexington school teachers union engineered a voter fraud scheme that caused a solid republican governor to get beat by a beto wannabe super lib governor. 2 counties cause the rest of Kentucky to suffer. Fraud was obvious but Bevin got no backing from rinos who want to see Trump gone. And of course the teachers union is recommending distance learning. Kentucky has hardly been affected by wuflu but today they enacted mandatory masks when in public. Bet that plays real well in Hazard or Cave City.

My daughter and both daughter in laws are in the public school system. They claim they are working harder now then when classes were being held. Monitoring kids completing online work tasks, video conferencing etc.

My daughter is a school counselor she says this is a complete mess and a utter disaster. Parents aren’t cooperating getting kids to do online classes. These are parents who use school as daycare and are too lazy to confront their kids anyhow and force them to do what’s required.

As of right now Governor Walz is suppose to decide what the plan will be this fall for school on July 27. My guess it will be some convoluted hybrid of staggered classes two or three days a week mixed with online classes. A bigger mess than what it already is.

The more they can keep things shut down the more they can justify shutting the polls down in November and go to mail in voting. That’s what ALL this is about right now. It’s amazing to see the things that are being done behind the guise of this Covid.

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My daughter and both daughter in laws are in the public school system. They claim they are working harder now then when classes were being held. Monitoring kids completing online work tasks, video conferencing etc.

My daughter is a school counselor she says this is a complete mess and a utter disaster. Parents aren’t cooperating getting kids to do online classes. These are parents who use school as daycare and are too lazy to confront their kids anyhow and force them to do what’s required.

Same for Mrs. M-11 who retired this year after 32 yrs. She said the last quarter (1st grade) was the most difficult of her career. She was usually up til 1100 or midnight waiting for parents to send in work. And now her former coworkers are trying to prepare for in-class start AND the possibility of a remote start for the upcoming year. This is on their own time (vacation) for which they aren't getting paid. A lot of parents found out just how tough the job is.

I believe most school employees work under a contract. The money is already there through property taxes. We have a nine year old son who was "Home schooled" during the shutdown. Although we're both educated in no way or form were we equipped to be teachers.Third graders doing algebra??? It's been about 45 years since I've done a word problem!!!From what I've heard, it's more time consuming for the teachers to do online. I can't wait for real school to start again.

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Parents aren’t cooperating getting kids to do online classes

I'll bet the little shits passed, can't leave anyone behind

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Originally posted by BigSwede:

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Parents aren’t cooperating getting kids to do online classes

I'll bet the little shits passed, can't leave anyone behind

Yep. My daughter said this was a blessing for a lot of students who just got passed through because of the situation. She said a half dozen of the students she counsels would have most likely not made graduation otherwise.

My wife is a HS guidance counselor. I can say that this past semester was more work for her. She earned every penny.
The only thing there was less of was the stress of experiencing students/parents in person.

My ex-wife is a high school teacher.

At the very start of the pandemic, she was definitely working harder than usual. Lots of Zoom classes each day, multiple individual contacts per week with each of her several hundred students, etc.

But after the first month or so, her school district seemed to just give up. The directive came down from admin that all the students' 3rd quarter final grades would simply be copied over to be their 4th quarter grades too, and the idea of "virtual schooling" was basically abandoned for the last 6-8 weeks of the school year.

So both the teachers and students have effectively been on Summer Break since early/mid-April, though the teachers continued to get paid through the end of their annual contract in May.

They may or may not have a better plan in place when school starts back next month.

Three of my grand parents were teachers. They told me that they were actually only paid for the months they worked, during the summer they received their pay because they had chosen to have a reduced payment during the school year. This was a choice by them, some teachers took the higher payment during the school year and worked odd jobs during the school break.

The kids need to go back to school in the fall....to a real building, they need social interaction.

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Originally posted by MikeinNC:
Three of my grand parents were teachers. They told me that they were actually only paid for the months they worked, during the summer they received their pay because they had chosen to have a reduced payment during the school year. This was a choice by them, some teachers took the higher payment during the school year and worked odd jobs during the school break.

It's still the same way, at least at the districts around here. Teachers are under contract from early August until the end of May, and only get paid during that contract period. But if you suck at budgeting, the district will allow you to structure out your contract pay to run August-July, getting a reduced paycheck each pay period in exchange for still getting a steady paycheck during June and July.

AZ teachers still hate our governor because he immediately agreed to their raise demands prior to his reelection, taking an election issue off the table for the teachers. They then actually went on strike anyway because the governor and legislature found a way to pay for the raise without a tax hike. That drove the teachers union over the edge with rage. They didn't care about the raise or the kids. They wanted to governor to commit political suicide and went on strike when he refused. You can imagine how they react now - anything he says or does, they are against it. Absolutely anything.

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Originally posted by M-11:

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My daughter and both daughter in laws are in the public school system. They claim they are working harder now then when classes were being held. Monitoring kids completing online work tasks, video conferencing etc.

My daughter is a school counselor she says this is a complete mess and a utter disaster. Parents aren’t cooperating getting kids to do online classes. These are parents who use school as daycare and are too lazy to confront their kids anyhow and force them to do what’s required.

Same for Mrs. M-11 who retired this year after 32 yrs. She said the last quarter (1st grade) was the most difficult of her career. She was usually up til 1100 or midnight waiting for parents to send in work. And now her former coworkers are trying to prepare for in-class start AND the possibility of a remote start for the upcoming year. This is on their own time (vacation) for which they aren't getting paid. A lot of parents found out just how tough the job is.

My wife has been a teach for 21 years, and she said this last semester has been the hardest/ most challenging since she started teaching.

Most teachers are working their asses off, but it is all for naught if the parents don't push the kids. For example, in June there was a study out that said only 56% of students grades 7-12 had logged on to do homework in the 50 largest US school districts. It may be a very different story with smaller districts, but the big ones essentially graduated a number of students that did almost zero work in the last semester so their graduation rates would not fall.

In my daughter's classes, she had 3 hours of online learning a day, and said that 80% of her class was on every day. In addition, she had 30 minute 1 on 1 from her four major class teachers every 2 weeks. This meant that those teachers (who typically have 3-4 classes (each 26-28) of kids) had one on one time with roughly 75 (assuming 80% participation of 3 classes of 28) students at 25-30 minutes each every 2 weeks, which is about 40 hours over 2 weeks, and that was in addition to regular classes, and does not include grading.

My wife is a reading specialist, and spent significantly more time with her students, and it was significantly harder as a result of those students with the greatest needs having secondary and tertiary disabilities, such as ADHD, ADD, and dyslexia.

If you think teaching is easy, try being married to a teacher.

OP, What are you talking about? Enlighten us - what teachers are getting paid to not work?

I don't know what's happening in AZ (a post above) but I have not heard of a school district anywhere that has totally shut down. Rather they have required teachers to switch to "remote learning."

In many locations that's required teachers to use their own equipment (some had to buy upgraded computers) and purchase software. Some software has been provided. Some is freeware.

My daughter and her husband both teach in GA. Luckily they were provided computers and most of the software.

Understand, the switch to remote learning (with pretty much no lead time) created a huge issue for teachers. It takes a lot of time to redo lessons. Plus the extra time teachers are taking to stay in contact with the kids.

I get it, we all had teachers we hate and many seem to think teachers are lazy or have it easy. But don't focus on the one or two lazy teachers you had and hated. The number of good/dedicated/hard working teachers far outnumber the bad teachers.

And let's get real, the pay is generally not that great and imagine having to deal with spoiled kids and their parents every day. Not a job that I'd ever consider.

We have some of the same grumblings here in Florida. Logistically not returning to school is a non starter. I don't care how it is spun there are not enough resources to transition our school population to online learning.

Even if you could have the upper grades go to online learning, you have eliminated things like band and athletics. Don't even try and tell me it would be ok to have sports teams congregating at school but not the regular student body.

Also eliminated would be thousands of jobs. (This isn't necessarily a bad thing, our district is top heavy in my opinion.) We don't need online PE teachers, dance teachers, band teachers, etc. Guidance counselors would be effectively neutered as they can't be certain that they have any sort of privacy if they are counseling a student via Zoom or Webex. What do you do with a student who may be suffering from abuse when their abuser is sitting next to them on the computer?

I really want the schools to reopen, warts and all. Maybe that's why I see so many obstacles to these alternative plans. Having been a public school teacher I feel as though the hurdles I mentioned are very real and far too high to assume we could effectively meet the needs of our students with makeshift approximations of a system that already is (to put it nicely) under strain.

My wife and I have two children. A girl, age 12, just finished 6th grade. A boy, age 8, just finished 2nd grade.

I am self employed and work from home about 50% of the time. My wife is employed 40 hours per week with a work from home job.

We are both educated and intelligent individuals who are involved in our children's lives. We are blessed that our children are also intelligent and are well behaved.

With all of that said, the virtual learning that we had to do from March, 23rd through May, 27th was a nightmare. One, it was hard on both the children and my wife, because they do not look at her as a teacher. Two, my wife now had an additional 15-20 hours of "work" she had to do each week. We realized very quickly that we are not homeschool parents and our kids are not homeschool children.

And we are privileged with a stable home environment. I cannot even imagine a single mother, with 2-3 children, working 40+ hours to make ends meet, tying to keep up with schooling.

Does COVID present an issue to schools? Yes, of course it does. But the bottom line is that our children's (and by our, I mean everyone in America) education is being sacrificed. The majority of children will not learn as well with virtual learning as they will in an actual school. Without actual school, the education of our youth will fall behind.

the teachers and counselors are earning their money.