By Darren Johnson
Campus News
Local K-12 school districts are torn when it comes to planning for fall. If they fully open – business as usual – surely COVID-19 will spread rampantly. If they go with an online/hybrid model, the problems are also serious:
- How will parents go back to work if they again have to stay home with their kids, essentially home-schooling them?
- Many parents are lousy at home schooling.
- Some teachers are also bad at delivering distance education.
- With distance education, there’s a wealth/technology gap that favors advantaged students.
Schools need to quickly pivot, and should hire recent, certified Education college grads for one-year contracts. This would solve many issues:
- These recent grads just went through a distance-ed COVID-19 semester. They are adept with the technology and crisis communications.
- They are typically younger and less susceptible to the damages of the disease.
- They have some fresh ideas on teaching and are adaptable.
- Having more teachers means classes will have a lower student:teacher ratio, thus making socially distancing easier and contagion less likely.
- These extra teachers can help students who fell behind this past spring catch up.
- It’s good to have more teachers on board should established teachers need help, become sick or if they are in a vulnerable population.
So, how do we pay for more teachers?
Clearly sports and activities are not going to happen this fall. Fall sports typically run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per school. Add in the savings from winter and spring and that money is a windfall for districts. Also, schools are saving money in other areas: Less electricity usage, less transient employees, less money spent on outside vendors, such as for graduation venues. Surely with this money schools could afford to hire many recent graduates (who get the lowest pay grade and typically only need insurance for themselves) for one-year contracts.
Because most K-12 administrations have been frozen for fear of the unknown, they haven’t been hiring new faculty. This means many recent Education grads aren’t landing the jobs previous generations did. These new teachers are available and looking for work.
K-12 school districts should act now to grab these recent Education grads, while they are still available.
Darren Johnson is publisher of Campus News. His daughter, Kaylee, is a recent Childhood Education graduate, and her experience helped inspire this piece.
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