School Support Workers Need Support
Posted on: Wednesday, 15 March 2006, 18:00 CST
School support workers need support
I read that the governor would like to earmark a large pay raise for Louisiana's public teachers.
Having graduated from Baton Rouge's own Robert E. Lee High School, I thought "good." Our educational system in general is highly underfunded. Class size, educational tools, facilities all of these were things I remember being frustrated about as a student.
One thing I often failed to see was also right in front of my face: school support workers.
They are the school bus drivers who pick up our children and see them safely to school (even when those same children terrorize them as my classmates did).
They are the cafeteria workers who perform the monumental task of feeding hundreds of children, cleaning up after them and doing it all over the next day.
They are the teacher aides who care for developmentally disabled children, provide secondary educational support to students and see that truly no child is left behind.
They are the clerical staff, the mechanics, maintenance personnel and custodial staff.
Without them our schools would be dirty, empty and useless.
That being said, starting pay for most support workers in East Baton Rouge Parish, for example, ranges from a little more than $8,000 to $14,000 at the higher end. By the time they are ready to retire, few of them even approach $20,000 a year. Some will retire earning little more than the new hires.
So how does this affect us besides maybe turning a few sympathetic ears? With these wages and attitudes toward our school support workers, we find our system understaffed and demoralized. Employees struggle to keep up with the excess load. Our single and married employees with children take on second jobs, wishing for more time to help their children prepare for academic success in a school system they themselves can't count on. In the end, we provide weaker educational services to the community.
There are things we can do to help alleviate this institutionalized poverty:
Contact your elected School Board members and let them know that support workers are part of the educational family, call in to the central office and remind them that their obligation to the public good extends to the community that our children live in, write and phone the governor and ask that money be specifically earmarked for support workers, restructure the MFP such that support workers share in mandatory, state-funded salary increases. Just take one action.
Jeff Shoji
union representative
Baton Rouge
Source: Advocate; Baton Rouge, La.
Related Articles
- FarStone Technology Offers Huge Discounts to Schools in Support of the Obama Education Stimulus Plan
- PBwiki Launches Campus Edition; Unlimited Collaboration for Schools of Up to 1,000 Participants
- Communities Decide Where U.S. Cellular Donates $1 Million to Support Schools
- Majority of CA's Top-Performing Public Schools Serving Children in Poverty Are Charter Schools
- MAXIMUS Special Education Case Management System Selected By Chicago Public Schools
- Pace University's School of Computer Science and Information Systems
- A Gift for Children; Educator Knows Potential When She Sees It
- Children's Hospital and Health System Selects MedAssets for Supply Chain Solutions
- Eclipsys Deploying Sunrise(TM) Advanced Clinical Solutions at Children's Hospital and Health System, Wisconsin
- Effect of Education on School-Age Children's and Parents' Asthma Management
 |
 |
User Comments (0)
RSS Feeds