June 24, 2010
Message to Open Plan Families from PAG Chair Lisa Crenshaw, Principal Jane Manley, and Head Teacher Jess Taylor:
A number of you have kept yourselves informed about the committee of parents who tried to convince the Modesto City Schools’ Board of Education that three of our teachers should not be included in lay-offs. They worked tirelessly: meeting, writing, talking, and meeting some more, to make sure they had all the background information needed to make a strong argument to the school board.
Unfortunately, on June 21st, the school board voted to lay off all the teachers on the list, including ours. Thank you to the committee of parents and teachers who maintained their focus on this issue and were willing to put in hours of their time and enormous amounts of energy. Many of you also attended school board meetings to support them. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Many of you will remember that Jane had conversations with district people about how many Primary classrooms we would have next year. We orginally thought that we would have two classrooms of about 30 students each. The district recently told us we could not go over the class size of 25 (less is ok) for first and second grades. The end result is that we will have one Kindergarten classroom, three classrooms in the Primary department, two in Middle, and two in Upper.
There is strong assurance from the Human Resources department that one of our Middle Department teachers will be able to return. For the other positions, we needed to advertise and interview. The only people we could interview were teachers on the official “bring back” list from the district.
An interview team completed interviews over the last week. We have offered positions to two teachers, one for Primary and one for Middle, who have accepted the offers. We do not have a third candidate at this time for the remaining Primary position. We will continue to try to find the BEST of the “bring back” teachers who really want to teach in Open Plan.
Even though we must accept this blow to our program, we hope that everyone can band together to try to move forward and do what is best for our students and teachers. They deserve our patience, care and attention.