Co-Op Student: Is Central Office Listening?

A Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School student wrote the following account of a sit-in in her school’s lobby last week, as students protested against a system-wide budget-cutting plan that involves eliminating 53 teaching positions.

On Friday, students at our school came together to protest the decision to transfer 53 teachers to different schools within the district and eliminate their positions.

Our protest, which consisted of over 30 upper- and lower-classmen peacefully and quietly occupying our school’s lobby, caught the attention of the assistant superintendent, Paul Whyte. In the middle of the protest, he and our principal, Val-Jean Belton, called in Lihame Arouna and I, Benie N’sumbu, due to our visibility in the news regarding this topic over the past week, to voice the students’ concerns.

Lihame and I said that students were upset that teachers were being taken away, despite being told that classrooms wouldn’t be affected when classes began in the fall. We also voiced our disapproval of how the directives to choose teachers to be transferred were given to administrators and how teachers were given the news. Lihame also echoed the idea that maybe cuts should also be made in central office. Whyte explained to us that schools were chosen because of enrollment and teaching positions were eliminated from classes that had low enrollment. He also informed us that cuts had already been made to central office.

We were also repeatedly told that when the maximum for students in one class is 27 and when a district is suffering from budget deficit, there is no justification why there should be multiple teachers teaching a course that has less than 15 students a class. Our response to that is that a maximum requirement doesn’t always mean a good thing. No one has yet to acknowledge the fact that research has shown that smaller classes yield better education quality for students.

Bigger class sizes might be better for the district, but they won’t be for the students.

Decisions to move teachers and eliminate positions are not easy ones, especially when we are in a budget deficit. We don’t know what the right answer is or the best path to take to get us out of this predicament, but what we do know is that this district has a problem with communication.

A decision to reassign 53 teachers shouldn’t have been made so clandestinely that even members of the Board of Education didn’t know what was happening until it was too late. It shouldn’t take students spending two class periods occupying a school lobby in order for an official to come down and explain to us the reasoning behind the decisions being made about our education.

Has Birks’s team done everything they possibly could to end this deficit before suggesting changes that will affect schools?

At the end of the day, we want student voices to be heard and while the adults in charge may say they hear us, no action has been taken to prove to us that they actually listened. We understand that this is a hard time for the district but there must be a better way to go about mitigation attempts, ones that are more inclusive — to parents, teachers and students — detailed, and accessible to the public in a way that can be understood fully.