I hope the Board of Managers has a plan for this.
Teachers had been shuffling in and out of Traci Latson’s classroom all day the first day back from spring break, trying to make sense of the news that broke that Houston ISD, the largest district in Texas, would be taken over by the state.
The effects of the soon-coming state intervention won’t be felt overnight. The current elected board and superintendent will be in place until the end of the school year to avoid further disruption. Then in June, a new board and superintendent will be appointed by TEA Commissioner Mike Morath.
In the meantime, Latson, a teacher at Meyerland Performing and Visual Arts Middle School, and her peers throughout HISD, have questions: How will this affect curriculum? Will schools close? What major changes will this board make?
“They’re just nervous, and they don’t know what to think,” Latson said of her peers. “We’re stuck in limbo hell.”
The Texas Education Agency started holding public hearings this week to try and quell some of these anxieties, but the first one was chaotic, interrupted by shouting and leaving many questions unanswered. In the first days back from the takeover, attendance among both teachers and students seemed to be fairly normal, multiple teachers told the Chronicle. The attendance rate for students was about 90 percent.
Latson has spent nearly three decades as an HISD teacher. She taught some of her students’ parents, and in another classroom one of her former students is now the one teaching the lesson plans. Despite her history with HISD, she has began to peruse other job postings.
“I don’t want to leave HISD. I love working in the city, I love our children, and, for the most part, I have been pretty happy with the district,” Latson said. “So, it does sadden me to even admit to myself that it might be time for me to leave.”
[…]
Although there is much left unknown in the district, teachers can likely count on having their jobs next year, said Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers. Contracts typically go out in May, which are binding for the next academic year.
Teachers actually have a great deal of job security, Anderson said, given the persistent teacher shortage compounded by the pandemic.
“I don’t care who runs the district. Somebody’s got to teach,” Anderson said. “It’s not like teachers are beating down the door. We started the school year with a teacher shortage that still exists.”
Houston ISD still has a vacancy rate of about 3.2 percent with roughly 336 openings, despite having one of the leading starting salary in the region at $61,500.
The district made an effort to persuade teachers to stay by awarding nearly $3.3 million in sign-on incentives for the 2022-2023 year to new teachers.
I don’t blame anyone for feeling adrift and insecure about what the future of HISD is. It would help greatly if the TEA held actually informative meetings rather than having PowerPoint shows that tell people things that are already publicly available, and it would help if Commissioner Morath could get his ass into town to talk to people. As long as there’s such a dearth of information, given how unprecedented this takeover is, it’s natural that fear and speculation would fill the void. The TEA owns all of this. It’s time they started acting like they understood the responsibility they have taken for themselves.
“It’s time they started acting like they understood the responsibility they have taken for themselves.”
except they clearly don’t.