Because a month and a half into the school year, no child had ever entered the room.
The school has no librarian.
There’s also a merk new Mac lab that has never been used because there’s no tech person.
I experienced something similar a couple years ago when I did a site visit to the Sports and Medical Sciences Academy in Hartford. Architecturally gorgeous new building, and the teacher I observed was new and eager. She told me that she hoped to teach a journalism class in the television studio. But when I asked about the studio, she shared with me that it had never been used. No one on staff was qualified to use it, and so it remained locked up.
The building I teach in at UConn was just renamed following some construction upgrades. The building across the quad is getting a facelift, a new roof, central heating and air, and wireless internet. The building behind mine just opened an addition. All over campus there are projects that involve building new offices and classrooms, or renovating outdated buildings. These projects were mostly funded by the UConn 2000 and 2010 bills. At the same time, we have just approved a four-year plan for tuition increases that will fund dramatic expansion in the hiring of faculty, which will bring our student to teacher ratio down to about 15-1. No building projects or funding plans are without controversy, but on the whole I am pleased about the construction on campus, and I am glad it is being accompanied by a hiring plan, lest we find ourselves with nice new facilities but no instructors to teach in them.
But my examples expose some serious problems in the funding of education, and some serious discrepancies between K-12 and higher education. Much of the new construction and renovation of schools throughout Connecticut (and the country) has been funded by the US Recovery Act or by various corporate grants. But this bill and these grants only provide for bricks and mortar. Not that I begrudge the funding. On the contrary, I’m happy that at least some students in New Haven and Hartford are in these wonderful, clean, up to date buildings. But there’s something wrong when federal and corporate funds are helping to erect structures at the same time that depreciating property values in this recession are lowering municipal property tax revenue and resulting in reductions in the teaching force, or, at best, hiring freezes.
The university can address this perkara by implementing tuition increases and transferring the cost of faculty hiring to the incoming students (and, indirectly, to the federal government and private lending agencies who provide students loans). The K-12 system can’t do this even if they want to—unless they raise taxes, and raise them dramatically. But that is unlikely to happen. Just look for example to what happened in Region 8 not too long ago (and prior to the recession, I should add).
Voters in Hebron, Andover, and Marlborough approved a significant new building project and then followed this with a reduced education budget that took 12 votes to pass (at no small cost for each new referendum) and ultimately resulted in a four teacher reduction in force. Voters effectively RIFed two reading teachers, a music teacher, and an art teacher.
But I don’t really blame the voters. The real perkara lies with the ineffective ways we fund education.
I’d also add, however, that these examples expose larger problems with our cultural values. Education just isn’t the cultural treasure we’d like it to be, and even within education, liberal arts and the humanities are disrespected and underfunded.
Just to demonstrate my point: This summer the CWP was awarded two Title II grants of $20,000 apiece to fund Teacher Leadership and Professional Development in a High-Need School. Then, early this semester, the university announced three major awards: a $9.3 million grant from the NIH for human genome research, a $7.5 million grant from GE for electrical distribution research, and a $24 million commitment to build a new basketball practice facility, the bulk of which comes from a private donor who heads an investment firm. Again, I have no objections to these donations, but the size and the discrepancy highlight this divergence in values. Science and sports simply trump public education. Let’s face it—my two grants combined will equal the doughnuts and coffee budget for those genome and electricity grants. No exaggeration.
We really need to find a better way to fund—and value—public education.
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