Teachers Say They Find School Staffing Plan Confusing

LAFAYETTE – Teachers from throughout the parish said Wednesday at a special workshop meeting of the Lafayette Parish School Board that they are confused by how the board’s staffing formula will play in classrooms.

Staffers with the system said they’re not hearing complaints from the principals of parish schools.

Melinda Mangham, a Lafayette High School teacher and president of the Lafayette Parish Association of Educators, said that with the start of school Aug. 19, many teachers still have no idea what they’re teaching.

“I cannot believe that we have reached this day and we have not decided staffing,” she said.

Mangham said teachers have called her not knowing they no longer had jobs. “This is just not right,” she said. “This has not been fair to the teacher corps.”

Superintendent James Easton said part of the problem is that one school does not want to accept its allocation of teachers for the year.

Ramona Bernard, director of human resources, had explained earlier in the meeting that administrators allocated numbers of teachers to schools based on the expected student populations of each school for the coming year.

She said the School Board set the formula in the summer of 2004, though it was finalized too late in the school year to be implemented until this year.

That formula calls for one teacher for every 21 students in kindergarten through third grade, one for every 23 students in the fourth grade, and one for every 26 students in the other grades.

Schools can exceed those numbers by two students per class until every class is two over the formula, at which time the school is eligible to get another teacher, Bernard said.

Scheduling, however, can make some classes larger than the formula calls for – even above the two-student allowance – while principals arrange for teachers to deal with electives, honors classes and other duties, she said.

How the schedules work and affect class sizes is left to principals to work out, Bernard said.

Easton said the staffing question begins with the board’s decision on the staffing formula.

“After giving principals the due allocation, the decisions must be made at the building level,” he said.

Easton said the school system must work within its resources to staff the schools to serve the basic needs of the majority of students.

For example, he said, that means the schools must have enough staff to teach English, but might not have enough to teach a special elective on Shakespeare, though that class would be desirable.

Easton said he understands principals are doing their best to boost the number of teachers they get for their schools.

What they shouldn’t do is hold up staffing decisions at individual schools while waiting to see if they can get more teachers, he said.

Youngsville Middle School teacher Molly Chiasson, whose son also attends that school, said her son is already set to be in a class of 30 students; and she’ll be teaching two classes of 30, and several more right at the middle-school limit set by the formula.

She said that follows a cut of three teachers from the school from the year that ended in June.

Chiasson said Youngsville is a fast-growing area and the classes are already at or above the maximum set by School Board policy.

“There’s no room for growth in Youngsville,” she said.

Board member David Thibodaux, a longtime proponent of reducing class sizes, agreed with Chiasson and other teachers’ complaints about the handling of the allocation of teachers.

“You’ve got the rhetoric of the (system) staff vs. the reality of the classroom,” he said.

Thibodaux was attending his first meeting of the board since suffering what was described as a “mild stroke” earlier this summer.

Board member Judy Cox, a former principal, said of Chiasson’s testimony that the numbers teachers are seeing might not hold up once scheduling is complete.

Cox said, in her experience, the student numbers fluctuate right up to the early part of the school year.

Bernard said no principals in the parish have complained about the staffing formula. She said that when the principals have had questions, they’ve brought them to system staffers and the problems have been worked out.

Board President John Earl Guidry noted that, while several teachers were at the meeting, no principals had attended to discuss the issue. He said some should have attended the meeting.

Mangham said she believes that some principals have problems with the staffing formula but see little reason in discussing it.

“They have basically been told to deal with it,” she said.