IF Training

Pam Schiffman recently sent an e-mail to I-SS teachers stating that Instructional Facilitator Training will begin in December. The e-mail is marked ‘** High Priority **.’

In the e-mail, teachers are asked if they are interested in becoming an I-SS Instructional Facilitator. Teachers are also informed that future Instructional Facilitators (IFs) are teachers who:

• Have had at least five years successful classroom teaching experience career status
• Are committed to continuous classroom improvement and the I-SS Model for Raising Achievement and Closing Gaps
• Exhibit strong people and leadership skills
• Enjoy helping fellow teachers develop high performing classrooms through training, coaching, & support
• Are willing and able to work and be paid August 1 through June 30
• Are willing to complete training in order to become qualified for future IF positions

The IF Training will begin in December and teachers are to contact Kim Rector or Sherrard Lewis if they are interested. According to the I-SS Organizational Chart, Kim and Sherrard are the Elementary and Secondary IF Coordinators, respectively.

This seems to be another example of the I-SS administration putting the cart before the horse. Most of the principals have indicated that the IF model needs to be tweaked and the teacher surveys have not yet been tallied. The roles of the IFs is still in question, yet someone in the Central Office has decided to go on with the IF training as usual. Shouldn’t the tweaking of the roles of the IFs be completed based on the results of the principal surveys and the teacher surveys before any IF training begins? Or, is that just too logical? Did Mr. Johnson approve this or is someone else running the Central Office?

Committee of the Whole Meeting

I attended the I-SS Committee of the Whole meeting last night. As you might suspect much of the time was spent talking about the budget for next year. The Statesville Record and Landmark has much of the information in today's print edition and posted on-line. There was a lot of bad news but I did get the impression that the Board and Dr. Holliday were sincere in their desire to retain all employees and especially teachers. The biggest concern seemed to be with respect to the teacher assistants. The state is considering no longer funding teacher assistants for the third grade. Of course this would mean that it would be difficult to retain all of the teacher assistants. It would also impact the running of the school buses since many of the teacher assistants are also bus drivers. They did say I-SS might be able to hire some of the fired teacher assistants as part-time bus drivers. I am sure that is not much consolation for those teacher assistants. There was also talk about changing assistant principals from 12 month contracts to 11 or 11.5 month contracts but no one suggested reducing the number of Central Office administrators. In my opinion, and in the opinion of others, I-SS has too many administrators and that I-SS could save some money by eliminating a few of them. Dr. Holliday did mention that if they did away with the Instructional Facilitators, those individuals would go back into the classroom and then I-SS would probably have to fire some non-tenured teachers since the Facilitators are tenured and have seniority. I think I-SS could keep those teachers if they did eliminate a few of those Central Office administrators. Dr. Holliday also stated that the Instructional Facilitator model is funded through Title I, Title II, and IDEA funds. Considering that the current implementation of the Instructional Facilitators is to enforce the Baldrige plan, is that really the proper use of those funds? Speaking of the Baldrige plan, another issue mentioned last night was that the fact that teachers were going to be asked to do more work for less pay. Wouldn't this be a great time to tell teachers that if they wanted to continue doing all the Baldrige paperwork in their classes they could do so, but that it would also be quite acceptable to use a different teaching method in their classrooms.

This post was written by Paul Klaene.