Budget Cuts (Opinion)

Jennifer Nall
Copy Editor

Budget cuts are on the rise; teachers and students at RHS will soon be affected and I hate to say it, I do not like the route that our district is taking. Sure, I won’t feel the changes directly; but it is so irritating to see the teachers that I personally like and some of the underclassmen suffering and get taken advantage of (for the worse). If you didn’t know, the district is leaning towards cutting teachers and plans on making the teachers who are staying, take up an extra class and some hall monitor duties.
If you don’t see anything wrong with that, then you won’t see the likely chances of students failing and dropping out, or teachers being over-worked and are not able to, in terms of standard based grading, “advanced” at their job. Teachers who will have to take up another class plus other duties will not have time to talk to individual students, they will be too busy cramming lessons together to teach for that day, or grading papers. You’re also screwing over students who go in on their own time to get help on a subject, like going to math café after school, but because teachers won’t have enough time for them. Teachers are just going to tell the students that they are too busy; so much for “No child left behind”.
Also, with standards based grading, teachers need to get to know their students so they can define what is proficient based on this student’s learning abilities. Which is fine now because teachers have extra time to get to know their students and know their learning capacities, but with 30 or more student’s faces to remember, they must be able to do it in a shorter amount of time. How will teachers find the time to know what proficient is for them, but that’s not too much to ask for, right?
Sure they still have planning periods, but what other extra classes will teachers be teaching? Are you going to ask a biology teacher to teach chemistry? What are they going to do? Go back to school to get a degree, and just be a couple days ahead of the students? No! Doing that plus all the other stuff they have to do; good luck making that work.
On a side note, I bet you never knew that the superintendent gets paid just as much as the president. He also has four assistants that have a hefty price tag as well. Could there be a possible pay cut? BUT what would I know? I’m just an average senior.