Reply to Does the MCPS proposal for zero additional teachers at programs hold water?

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Reply to "Does the MCPS proposal for zero additional teachers at programs hold water?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm not very familiar with how high school staffing works or with the details of the qualifications needed to teach in the various programs MCPS is proposing, so although it doesn't seem right to me, I would love to hear from folks who understand this better.

MCPS is saying there will not be any extra staffing for any of these programs (except for one program coordinator per school covering all programs at that school), and that the teachers will just come out of the regular staffing allocations at each high school. They have also said that the new programs will phase in so that teachers would only be teaching the program classes to 9th graders the first year, 9th and 10th the second, etc.

Does that seem like it will work?   Do schools already have the staff needed to teach most or all of these classes, and will they have enough space in their schedules to add the new program classes without decreasing access to classes for non-program students?  Will this still be true at schools that lose a lot of their staff due to drops in enrollment after the boundary changes? (I believe high schools lose about 4 teachers for every 100 students they lose?)

Or are any of the classes for the programs specialized enough that some schools may not already have the staff needed to teach them, and if so, how would they find the space in the staffing budget to add new teachers?  Are there non-program classes they could cut to make this work?  Would these specialized teachers be able to take over other standard classes for non-program students to make a full schedule, or would they need to hire these teachers at a 0.2 or 0.4 the first year and slowly build up (and would teachers be OK with that)?

The proposed classes for the various programs are here (pages 37-86), for reference: https://go.boarddocs.com/mabe/mcpsmd/Board.nsf/files/DMJHXR4AA9BD/$file/Boundary%20Studies%20Program%20Analysis%20Update%20251016%20PPT%20REV.pdf[/quote]

There’s no viable alternative to hiring except phase in, but even phase in won’t be enough because each section of a program is one lesson section of a gen pop class that a teacher can take on.

I saw this at my school. We had a mostly magnet teacher take on an elective instead of one comprehensive course. For two years afterwards, the comprehensive classes for her grade level swelled. Eventually, the county granted us an allocation that covered the fifth class. Meanwhile, the rest of us teaching a mixed load were told that we couldn’t pick up an elective due to the impact on comprehensive.

The single program coordinator is a very bad idea. They can’t serve multiple masters.[/quote]

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