The teachers of the Tucson Unified School District managed again the impossible under impossible conditions on the first day of school. Short approximately 125 teachers, and with upwards of 60 students in one class, the teachers welcomed their students with open arms.
The District, under the leadership of Governing Board president Adelita Grijalva and Superintendent H.T. Sanchez had promised a cap on class size of 1 to 27, but on Thursday even kindergarten classrooms had up to 30 students.
Despite the fact that they are the highest paid teachers in the area, the District has been unable to hire enough permanent teachers. In some schools like Cholla High, the District has refused to follow the desegregation order and hire highly skilled permanent teachers. For years the students at Cholla have had few opportunities to study math and science with permanent teachers who are expert in their area of study.
The desegregation funds in part, were intended to recruit, train, and retain highly skilled teachers for underserved communities. One desegregation plaintiff representative pointed out recently that now that Tucson is the 8th poorest metropolitan area in the country, nearly every student in the District is underserved.
This week, Board members were asked for assistance by a District advocate on behalf of a Catalina High School student who was told that Calculus would not be offered this year. Catalina should be getting additional desegregation funding because of its demographics. However, “Catalina wanted to offer calculus this year, but the District’s administration eliminated Calculus and set the minimum class sizes far too high for advanced classes, particularly in the deseg schools,” a retired District teacher told District officials.
Millions of desegregation dollars pour into the District for the purpose of leveling the playing field, but those dollars are funneled into the District’s central administration and away from schools. One teacher reported, that she spent one entire day this summer, cobbling together a complete math curriculum for her students.
According to sources, the District has gotten away with limited and piece meal curriculum because it employs so many substitutes who aren’t hindered by an incomplete curriculum because it is unlikely that they will be in the same classroom for the entire year.
Board member Michael Hicks is outraged by the situation. He said on Thursday, “They had all summer to recruit teachers for our students. Instead they start the push these last two weeks. This is an unacceptable situation. We treat our teachers like second class citizens. Administration and other Board members complain that they are whining and think that they should be catered to. Well, we would have nothing without them. They have to be a priority.”
Only this past weekend did the administration have a job fair, but it is tough to fill the spots when the District continues to make empty promises. One recently retired teacher, who has worked in the District for years, said that she had considered offering her services as a substitute, but after seeing the unwieldy process that the administration has in place, she opted out.
“Because so little attention is paid to TUSD classrooms it is no wonder that the administration essentially “forgot” to recruit enough teachers. After all, they were so busy hiring Governing Board President Grijalva’s mother-in-law as a principal and several of Superintendent Sanchez’s Texas friends as high level administrators they must have been simply exhausted. Despite the fact that quality teaching is the only school related factor that makes a difference in student learning TUSD leaders act as if they were completely unaware of that reality. It is clear that more than 50% of TUSD’s revenues are spent outside its classrooms. What is becoming just as clear is that a similar proportion of TUSD’s energies are also placed outside the classroom in areas, i.e. administration and failed programs, that do not enhance student learning,” said one former teacher and public school advocate.
“A much better use of desegregation dollars would be to offer bonuses for highly rated TUSD teachers to transfer to difficult to staff schools or to entice teachers in hard to staff areas…like the hard sciences and special education…to move to TUSD from other states or districts,” continued the former teacher. “That would not only allow TUSD to fill unfilled positions, but it would allow the students with the greatest challenges to work with TUSD’s best teachers. The fact that TUSD began the school year so short of teachers is a natural consequence of the leadership’s focus on personal and political agendas instead of student learning.”
Grijalva and Hicks are both up for re-election this year. On Thursday, fellow Board member Cam Juarez told a Tucson radio show host that the District needed to change its culture. That culture has been carved out over the years under the leadership of Grijalva and her father Congressman Raul Grijalva, who served as a TUSD Board member before her.