More Coffee, Please

I haven’t been able to confirm it, but rumor says there are four science teachers leaving Monadnock this year—they’ve already found jobs, and it’s a done deal. More might leave—and why not? Science teachers are in short supply.

That’s 50% of the department.

I’ve reported on it before, but there are definitely going to be 4 positions open in the English department—possibly more.

That’s at least 44% of the department.

With Joe Smith moving to Cutler and Doug Gagne retiring, that’s 66% of the administration gone, and the one veteran, Brian Pickering, is in a new position.

A quick scan of the MRHS faculty roster tells me there are 64 teaching positions. There’s a confirmed 12.5% going—but at least 38 teachers have asked for a letter of recommendation. Assuming half of those who have done so leave, that’s 23.4%—and assuming the ones who have asked for a letter are not the ones already leaving, it’s actually closer to 39% of the faculty might be gone next year.

To put it into military terms,¹ the whole army is facing up to 39% casualty rate, and some units are running as high as 50%. In a modern army, a unit is considered non-useful when it’s at 70-80% strength, and “destroyed” (in other words, its people need to be incorporated into other structures) when it’s around 50% strength.

If there was anyone who wanted to destroy public education in the district, they’ve done a pretty good job.

What’s really being eroded here is not “combat effectiveness”, the ability to attack the enemy. It’s the loss of institutional memory, the culture and ways of the school, and the good practices and relationships that allow the building to operate. Everyone will be a in a new role, and there will not be the frictionless operation of a well honed group of individuals who are practiced in their tasks.

There are opportunities as well as problems with this. The problems are obvious—there are going to be more replacements than there are veterans. Mentoring and training are going to be difficult, if not impossible, tasks. Teachers, especially new ones, will exist as islands without the support of a strong cadre of trained professionals who can help them. Passing down knowledge, even such basic knowledge as what the curriculum is and what to teach, will be difficult.

On the other hand, there’s also opportunity. If there are problems in the institutional memory, then having it destroyed is not necessarily a good thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I personally think it’s going to take a miracle—or a lot of innovative hard work—to keep the school from a very tough year. I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of joy next year; there’s going to be a lot of people struggling to survive. It has nothing to do with the quality of the people there, but I think the support they need to be effective will not be present. With the school already struggling with AYP and budget and contract issues² it’s going to require people do things they have never done before.

But doing things they’ve never done before is not a bad thing. I think this could be the start of a group of people who are more open to trying something different, who are more willing to be innovative, who are more capable of trying to make the changes needed to be successful. If the culture can be changed at this moment to make the kind of adaptations needed to face the challenges, then it might be viewed as a period of re-grouping, of repositioning.

But it’s going to need to be done under fire, and it’s going to take a great deal more communication—both inside the school and out. The attacks from groups like the Monadnock Taxpayers Association are going to continue, and they’re going to be more and more “true” because while the schools regroup, they will be less effective. It’s a bit like Axis Sally after Dunkirk—bleating that the other side is losing will appear correct, no matter how wrong it is.

But the schools are going to need to get on the air and fight back. I look at Mama K’s short, to the point, and absolutely correct rebuttal of the misconceptions posted on the Keene Sentinel talk-back page about the gym floor on April 10 as a perfect example of what happens when rank and file teachers start getting engaged in public discourse.

We know the truth, and we need to make sure we share it.

More importantly, the more honest we are, the more we share what our challenges are and where we need help, the more the community will be involved—and we need that more than anything. I’m tired of complaints that parents don’t care—they do.

They just need an invitation in.

1 It takes a little reading but the relevant portion is: “Every combat unit has a maximum strength before battle, which generally changes little. Continuous combat degrades unit strength, and such losses must be countered by a continual influx of trained replacements. The mathematical measure of this degradation at any point in time is expressed in terms of a percentage of the unit’s strength prior to the action. Obviously, if the replacement rate does not equal or exceed the casualty rate, the unit strength will continue to drop until the unit becomes completely ineffective. There is a lower limit to this ratio, which if penetrated on the downside results in the unit being considered combat ineffective. Generally, a unit that has sustained casualties of 30 percent or more is considered combat ineffective. If this ineffectiveness persists, usually the only course of action open to the commander is to assimilate the unit’s members into other units.” ↺

2 In honesty, the budget and contract issues are a primary reason the school is in the shape it is—the reason for the casualties—but that’s another story. ↺

Gregarious

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