Reply to Ludlow-Taylor principal made permanent!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As an insider, we all want the best for the students, at the same time we teachers want to be respected. 
Some of these teachers feel like their principals place too much emphasis on wrong things. There’s no freedom for the teachers to be creative or exercise their professional judgment, without being attack with passive-aggressive. Others simply don’t feel supported by their admins; they feel like workhorses who continually have more demands stacked on their plates without any acknowledgment or appreciation of what they do. One teacher put it this way: “I want to be a part of helping admin see that they should treat their teachers as though they are valued.”  The school is losing the best teachers due to Principal Miller. 
[/quote]

This is hyperbole unless there are a bunch of teachers actually leaving who haven’t announced it yet. There was actually relatively limited turnover of class room teachers over the summer. The SPED/wellness staff was decimated and that was partly owing to the poor choice by Principal Miller previously discussed in this thread, but there was also a complete DCPS-forced shift in what self-contained classrooms were offered, so some of the movement was natural. There is a huge problem with not having enough aides, but that’s partly district/country wide and partly because LT actually promoted 3 fabulous aides to classroom teachers, which is exactly what you want a school to do even if it causes short-term chaos. Since the year started, there has only been one departure of someone who wasn’t brand new and while that one (again SPED/wellness) is a big loss, it’s not primarily because of Principal Miller.

LT’s teachers are largely awesome. It was amazing to see how many went all out for the first day of Spirit Week yesterday, for example. I know there has been some friction with Principal Miller largely over issues relating to short staffing. I don’t think she’s handled them perfectly, but I think she is trying and I think she can be reasoned with; it is very hard to deal with issues like this when you have no prior long-term credibility with teachers and it’s why schools with pandemic turnover in admin are universally in a tough spot. There are some internal promotions I would love to see that could help with this. Hopefully next year.

But objectively LT’s test scores were solid and even increasing (among the unicorns in DC), , it’s IB percentage crept up at a time when many established schools were losing kids, it has a very involved parent base/community (about 500 people came to movie night) with a PTO that I would guess rivals any school’s, and an incredible aftercare and clubs program (I actually don’t know if a single other school with offerings as extensive). LT will be fine and I hope its teachers stay the course and give the principal another year or two to reach an equilibrium, because I don’t think she’s going anywhere.[/quote]

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