Reply to Study Reveals FCPS Teacher Career Salaries $142K Below Average of Regional Peers

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Well it's 180 days of school correct? The typical contract length ranges from 194 days to 260 days. I think about 200 is average. A typical school day is about 6.5 hours of which a teacher gets off about 0.5 hours. Planning time is built into the remaining 6 hours. 200 days x 6 hours = 1200 hours per year.  If you wanted to add 1 hour of extra planning/grading time per day just add an additional 180-200 hours. You can divide whatever teacher pay (including or not including benefits) by these amounts to get an hourly rate.[/quote]

FCPS teacher contracts are 7.5 hours per day.  .5 hours of that is lunch time.  The vast majority of teachers use lunch time to check email, reach out to parents, and to run lunch groups with kids.

You say that planning time is built into the school day.  Here's the truth.  In our elementary school, each teacher gets 1 hour of "planning time" per day.  1 out of 5 days a week, it is a mandatory Collaborative Learning Team meeting - a meeting with other teachers who teach your grade, plus special education teachers, other specialists, and administrators.  So that leaves you 4 hours of planning a week.  Now, that "planning time" also includes dropping off and picking up your students from another specialist -- so it may take 5-10 minutes in each direction to walk your whole class down to the gym and then go down and pick them up.  So, let's say, generously, that you have 45 minutes a day to plan.

Each day, you teach blocks of 90 minutes of Language Arts, 60 minutes of Math, 45 minutes of Social Studies, 45 minutes of Science, and 30 minutes of Health.  Then there is a remediation block where you are supposed to plan individualized activities for all of your students - extra help for kids who need remediation, enrichment for those who need enrichment.   So, at the very least, you have to plan lessons and activities for 5 different subjects.  Within Language Arts and Math, you are required to have rotations for different activities for groups at different levels.  So, you're not just planning one lesson; you're planning a group lesson plus 4 additional activities.

Now, I've worked in professional fields other than teaching.  And generally, when I had to do an hour-long presentation, I would take at least that long to plan for it.  So, teachers are planning for 4 or 5 different blocks of instruction per day.  By planning, I mean, designing the lesson, creating activities, creating SMART Board presentations or handouts, designing assessments, and making materials available online or making paper copies, locating and organizing manipulatives, etc.  Do you really think any teacher can actually design quality instruction for 4 or 5 different subjects a day in just 45 minutes?!?!

On top of that, teachers are answering parent emails, returning parent calls, meeting with administrators, meeting to collaborate with specialists like a Reading Specialist and Technology Specialist, attending IEP meetings, creating spreadsheets of data, analyzing data, and, oh yeah, grading papers.

All that is supposed to happen during this planning time as well.  Yeah, right.

When I taught high school, I my contract hours were up around 2:30.  I stayed in the building until at least 6:30 every night, and I STILL took work home on nights and weekends.  On average, I worked an additional 25 hours during the week and maybe 4-8 hours on the weekend, some weekends longer.  That's IN ADDITION to the school day.

Every "vacation" - like winter break and spring break -- I'd work at least a 40 hour week grading projects and papers, planning units, and writing college recommendation letters for 80-100 kids.  Summers, I'd go in early to get my classroom set up, take classes, and spend a lot of time reading and preparing for the next year (especially when you find out that all of a sudden you're teaching another grade or subject the next year and have to learn a whole new curriculum.)

Every job I have ever had in the private sector - including a technology company and on Capitol Hill - was significantly less stressful and less time consuming.  Most professionals can take coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, and DCUM breaks whenever they want during the day.  They can stop and talk to colleagues about work or your weekend or the news when you need a mental break.  Teachers can't.  When teachers need to take sick days, they have to spend hours writing lesson plans and creating activities for a person to do in their absence.  None of that time is part of the built in "planning time" at school.  There's no such thing as comp time or flex time.

I'm not complaining.  I love my job.  But I get furious when I hear people claim that we work 6.5 hour days and have all this time off.  If FCPS teachers "worked to the rule" - that is, only worked their actual contract hours and did NO uncompensated work other than that - this entire system would grind to a complete halt.  The school system DEPENDS on teachers planning and grading beyond contract hours and supervising clubs and extracurriculars and helping students after school and spending breaks and summers planning, preparing, and grading.  So stop evaluating our compensation as if we were factory workers who got to leave when the whistle blows.

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I'm not sure what to say about the planning time. MCPS has curriculum 2.0 so their teacher don't have to focus on what to teach and provide but many FCPS teachers want more control leading to the current ecart system and no textbooks. I've heard LCPS has a similar system. If you want a curriculum 2.0, lobby for it. Also in FCPS there is only ever Science or Social Studies taught each day and on one of those days the FLES teacher teaches during this time so the teacher only has to prepare four 45 minute lessons a week for science/social studies. Health is a shared teaching time with the guidance counselor although some of these lessons are taught by the teacher. It's only once every other week though. At most an elementary teacher is teaching lessons for about 4.5 hours out of the 7.5 hours they are contracted for (.5 hours opening and closing, 1.5 hours language arts, 1 hour math, 0.5 hours remediation/enrichment, 1 hour science/social studies/health).[/quote]

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