Eight Falmouth teachers spoke to the Falmouth School Committee last week about difficult working conditions. The president of the Falmouth Educators’ Association said charges will be filed with the Massachusetts Department of Labor Relations.
“I can’t say ‘nightmare’ enough times,” Falmouth High School history teacher and FEA vice president James Deasy said, speaking about the new software system Schoology, which teachers at the Lawrence School and Falmouth High School must use.
“The software does not do what was promised. It does not integrate with PowerSchool, and it does not integrate with Google Docs, which is the electronic file cabinet of all of my teaching materials for the last eight years,” Mr. Deasy said. “Grades do not integrate between the two systems; linking grades is almost a joke at the school. We have to have multiple workarounds. The apps we were trained on don’t work. I cannot use the discussion feature in Schoology. It doesn’t work. It worked perfectly in Google Classroom.”
Students are struggling to use it, Mr. Deasy said in comments to the committee and in a follow-up email.
“It is a nightmare for special education students, particularly those with executive functioning issues and ELL [English language learning] students. Students looking for current or past work assignments can’t find them,” he said. “The administration looks at these as growing pains. In reality, this is a program that is riddled with broken promises and bugs without fixes that is leaving in its wake burned-out teachers and students who are not getting the educational experience they deserve.”
During his comments, Mr. Deasy said a survey of staff and students showed a majority of both populations agrees with him.
“Teachers are frustrated, overwhelmed and angry that we have had to switch in the middle of a pandemic to a software system that does not work,” he said.
Mullen-Hall School 4th-grade teacher Lilia Davis spoke on behalf of the 3rd- and 4th-grade teachers in the Falmouth Public Schools. She thanked the school district for hiring teaching assistants for each grade level at each school but said teachers need much more help.
“We are asking students to learn in an environment that frustrates them and hinders their growth,” Ms. Davis said. “As 3rd- and 4th-grade teachers, we are being asked to work two jobs without sufficient time to plan, in environments we know are absolutely not conducive to learning.”
By “two jobs,” she was referring to teaching in-person and remotely at the same time.
“The result is that our students are suffering,” she said, adding that she and her colleagues have to make sure all of their lessons and activities are accessible digitally. “This makes things like science activities, which require nondigital materials, very difficult to plan and manage. It also means we have to make every worksheet, every ‘manipulative,’ every sticky note and every book we read aloud available in digital form. This takes an extremely long time to plan for. We are currently teaching more subjects with less and inadequate planning time.”
Ms. Davis said it is impossible to create a “class culture” when classrooms are split with half of the students on Zoom and half in-person. “Every lesson and activity feels disconnected and cumbersome,” she said.
She and other 3rd- and 4th-grade teachers are being asked to work in a gym with only a curtain to block the sound generated by 80 people.
“It’s impossible to hear unless we’re plugged into Zoom,” Ms. Davis said. “The environment is distracting and irritating.”
The bottom line, Ms. Davis said, is that while the 3rd- and 4th-grade teachers are happy to be back with their children in school, they are “running on empty” and putting in “extreme amounts of time and effort and neglecting our families and our personal health to produce watered-down, poor-quality education.”
“We can get creative with the COVID-regulated world,” she said, “but we need remote teachers for 3rd and 4th grades.”
“There is not a day when one or more staff members is not visibly upset or crying at school,” East Falmouth Elementary School 2nd-grade teacher and building director Tracy L. Chorches said.
The mental health of staff and students is a common topic of conversation at East Falmouth Elementary School, she said.
“The morale in the building is at an all-time low,” Ms. Chorches said. “Teachers feel alone, abandoned, disconnected, isolated and unsupported. They feel exhausted. On weekends, many of them go home and spend a good 40, 50 or 60 hours working on the plans and playlists they have to provide weekly.”
“I love my job, but something needs to be done,” she concluded, audibly on the verge of tears.
Lisa Ann Willcox, a speech language pathologist at East Falmouth Elementary school, said she has 31 students across 13 classrooms.
“I am exposed every day to many cohorts of students, many more than my colleagues. This is not an equitable risk. All of the related service providers are in the same position. We do have personal protection equipment, but it is very difficult to manage using it all and doing therapy with the kids,” she said.
Ms. Willcox said there are “lots of issues” around trying to teach virtually and in-person at the same time. “When I am wearing a mask and the student in the room is wearing a mask, the virtual learner can’t hear us. I can’t combine students as I was hoping to do,” she said.
Tara Draper, a library technology teacher at East Falmouth Elementary School, has worked in the Falmouth schools for eight years and said she “absolutely loves” her job.
Ms. Draper said the school administration changed the agreement it had made with specialist teachers last summer, whereby they would be scheduled to work with only one, or maybe two, grade levels at a time for a specific number of weeks of the year to prevent them from becoming “superspreaders” of the coronavirus.
“Unfortunately, this decision has now been changed by the administration,” she said, “and every specialist in all the elementary schools will be seeing multiple classes from multiple grade levels on every single day of the school week. Inevitably, we are going to become superspreaders of this disease, and because of this, not only are we risking our health and the health of our families, we are risking the health of every single student in our buildings.”
North Falmouth Elementary School teaching assistant Lori Raber said there is “no time for student evaluations or Individual Education Plan meeting, and no time for paperwork or documentation without canceling time with students or using ‘prep’ or lunch time.”
“I feel like an air traffic controller all day,” Teaticket Elementary 3rd-grade teacher Nichole Freeman said. “I am multitasking all day long and feel so split, not being able to give my full attention to anything. Time is a major issue. There is simply not enough of it. I am spending a great deal of my time curating, creating and preparing lessons suitable for learning plans that allow all students equal access to the curriculum in all subject areas.
“In addition, the district decided to implement a new phonics program in grades 1 through 3. Simply put, the time needed to prepare effective lessons far exceeds that of any other year in my 20-plus years in education. Time needed to set up, troubleshoot and support technology remains an issue. I cannot effectively hear remote learners, and my remote learners cannot hear my in-person students, taking away from any collaborative discussion that promotes learning. While I am grateful that the district hired a staff assistant, I do not have time to plan for another person. I do not have time to train that person on the new school safety protocols, to use technology, teach her Google Classroom or orient her to my playlists and learning plans.”
Most of the teachers who spoke at the school committee meeting had more to say but ran out of time due to the two-minute limit for public comments.
“This wasn’t said but it would have been my summation if I had had time,” Mr. Deasy wrote in a follow-up email. “In a meeting last summer, the school committee praised Superintendent Lori S. Duerr for the three plans that were developed for school reopening. As witnessed on Tuesday evening of last week, October 27, by the many teachers who expressed their frustration, feelings of being overwhelmed and anger, the execution of those plans has been a disaster.
“What I did not say is that I am spending 10 to 12 hours a day working. This includes weekends,” Ms. Freeman wrote in a follow-up email.
She continued, “My workload severely impacts the amount of time I have for my own family and my own personal health and well-being. I love my job, and I love my students and families. They are why I dedicate so much of my life to my job. I just do not know how much longer I can sustain this pace. Much of what was said by me and others at that meeting seemed to fall on deaf ears. Elementary teachers need time in our regular working day similar to that of our upper-level colleagues to collaborate, curate and plan lessons.”
Lori Andrade, FEA president and assistant principal and special education building administrator at East Falmouth Elementary School, stated at the meeting that “currently and regrettably, FEA has been left with no other option but to file charges with the Department of Labor Relations for failure to bargain in good faith and refusal to bargain over mandatory subjects of bargaining.”
“It is more than unfortunate” that the FEA’s last “productive” meeting with the school committee was on September 24, when it countered the school committee’s proposal made two days earlier, Ms. Andrade said.
Since then, she said there have been prolonged delays between meetings. The school committee’s “unwillingness” to counter the FEA’s October 12 proposal has brought about the current situation, she said.
“FEA’s latest proposal, which we designed as a comprehensive bundle package, could have ended two Step III filed grievances and prevented two more potential grievances that were filed today as well as completing the memorandum of agreement we have been working on tirelessly since July,” Ms. Andrade told the committee.
Before closing the public comment period, committee chairwoman Kelly A. Welch said, “We don’t usually respond to public comments, but I think it would be remiss to not at least acknowledge the wildly inappropriate way that we were just informed that we are being sued for unfair labor practices, and it would be remiss to let the public think that this committee is in some way not doing our part of the bargain by sitting at the table.”
“We have met at least weekly with FEA, and our (bargaining) committee has met at least twice weekly to work through all the issues for the MOA,” she said. “I don’t want to leave the public thinking it is somehow our negligence that has caused us to be where we are.”
In an email after the school committee meeting, Ms. Andrade said she sent an email to Ms. Welch formally requesting that at the next school committee meeting on Monday, November 16, Ms. Kelly make a statement “correcting her rare response to the public comment I made.”
Ms. Andrade also said the FEA is not suing the district but filing charges.
She said the announcement of filing charges was not a “big reveal” to the committee because she had made a statement at the end of a meeting on two Step III grievances on October 20, which was clearly the same message “in content and intent.”
“I believe it was inappropriate to inaccurately depict the situation,” Ms. Andrade said of Ms. Welch’s comments. “I have always been honest and transparent with the superintendent and the school committee as well as anyone else about FEA.”
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