Hartford Budget Cuts Threaten Achievement

Budget cuts are creating serious problems for staff and students at Hartford Joint 1 School District. Staff members who met with OnWEACto express their concerns about the cuts are (left to right) Ed Behnke, district maintenance foreman and president of the Hartford Association of Support Personnel; Terri Kehl, a 4th-grade teacher at Lincoln Elementary School; Julie Kenney, a special education teaching assistant at Rossman Elementary School and secretary of HASP; and Taira Grubb, an art teacher at Rossman and president of the Hartford Elementary Education Association.

By Bill Hurley

When Terri Kehl recently went to her school’s only copy machine to duplicate some materials for her class, two people were lined up in front of her.

“And there went my prep time,” said the 4th-grade teacher at Lincoln Elementary School in Hartford.

By itself, it was not a major incident. But it is representative of the growing daily frustrations teachers and education support professionals throughout the state are experiencing as the result of school budget cuts.

Why did Kehl’s prep time get eaten up at the copy machine? It all comes down to money.

• The Hartford Joint 1 School District has eliminated six teaching aide (paraprofessional) positions this year. In the past, an aide would have helped Kehl prepare materials, freeing up her time to work with students and plan classroom activities.
• Kehl’s available prep time has been dramatically shortened as a result of the layoff of the paraprofessionals. Everyone chips in to make up for the lost work.
• Little or no money is left for items such as copy machines, so staff time is wasted standing in line.
  

Of course, the repercussions of budget cuts are far more extensive than waiting at the copy machine.

Teachers and support staff in Hartford – which is about 25 miles northwest of Milwaukee – will tell you the students are the real victims.

With the elimination of all six regular classroom teacher aides in the district this year (a total of 10 full- and part-time aides over the last two years), students who need extra help simply are not getting it. One of those aides, for example, worked extensively in the classroom with students who do not speak English. Her loss translates into reduced academic achievement for some students.

“I have this cute little (Spanish-speaking) boy in class who just smiles at me,” Kehl said. “He has no clue what’s going on.”

The student does receive training in another class from a special education aide (for English language learners), but he needs an in-class aide to keep up in the classroom, Kehl said.

Meanwhile, teachers are picking up the slack in other areas, devoting their precious time to hall duty, playground duty, and crossing guard duty, said Taira Grubb, a K-5 art teacher at Rossman Elementary School and president of the Hartford Elementary Education Association. In addition, teachers are devoting extra time to helping absent students catch up or providing extra help to students who are having trouble reading.

That’s fine, she said, but there are only so many hours in a day. When teachers are performing these duties, they aren’t preparing as they should for their next class or devoting appropriate time to all students.

Cutting into quality
In addition to the severe cuts in paraprofessional positions, the district has eliminated three part-time secretaries and 1½ maintenance positions, leaving only two maintenance staff for the three-school K-8 district.

The district also eliminated a music teacher, cut out the 5th grade band and orchestra program, and eliminated the keyboarding teacher who worked with students at all three schools. Administrators have asked classroom teachers to incorporate keyboarding into their curriculums.

“That’s like adding a 30-minute class into our day,” Kehl said. “It’s very difficult to juggle.”

And, of course, not all teachers have the skills and training necessary to teach keyboarding.

‘Rearranging the deck chairs’
The district has instituted, for the first time, a full-day kindergarten program (which required the hiring or reassigning of eight teachers) and is struggling to maintain its SAGE program, which provides smaller class sizes in grades K-3.

SAGE, which is supported with state funding, requires that classrooms have no more than 15 students, but allows some flexibility in how a school does that. Hartford puts 20 students in each of its SAGE classrooms and floats a fifth teacher per grade level to help out. Some of those “fifth teachers” are reading specialists who were reassigned from providing reading support for higher grades.

“So what they did,” Grubb said, “was they pulled all support from 4th, 5th and 6th grade on up and put the whole emphasis on K-3.”

Regular classroom teachers are left with the job of devoting extra time to children who need special help, which reduces the time they can put into teaching the rest of the students.

“And I’m not trained as a remedial reading teacher,” added Kehl.

It all goes back to 1993
Hartford teachers and support staff agree that today’s severe problems can be traced back to 1993 when the Legislature and governor enacted school district revenue controls and the Qualified Economic Offer (QEO) law. The level of spending a district is allowed under revenue controls is based on the previous year’s spending. The Hartford base level of spending started out very low because in the early 1990s, the district “cut everything to the bone,” Grubb said. “We’ve just been limping along ever since because we have nothing left.”

Not only is the district starved for needed funds, the teachers and support staff have received little or no pay increases over the last 10 years due to the impact of the QEO and rising insurance costs, which have cut into the teachers’ salaries in recent years.

“My take-home pay has gone down for the last four consecutive years,” said Kehl, who is at the top of the salary schedule, where there is no opportunity for advancement.

The teachers and support staff do not blame their superintendent or school board members, whom Grubb said are “over a barrel” and are “extremely frustrated while stretching money as far as they can.”

The district’s problems are the combination of revenue controls, the QEO and the impact of a local so-called “taxpayers group.” It was such a group that brought about the severe belt-tightening in the early 1990s, Grubb said. And now, another group has surfaced and is attacking the health plan of teachers and education support professionals, an admittedly attractive plan that Grubb points out has survived only because of sacrifices made in salaries over the years.

Now, as 2003-05 bargaining begins, the school board is signaling that it wants to make changes to health benefits, on top of concessions made in the 2001-03 contract.

Running out of options
The district, which has suffered two consecutive years with a budget deficit, failed to win approval last year of a $600,000 referendum to exceed revenue caps. Now, on top of the staff cuts, the reserve fund is being depleted, student fees are increasing, and some extracurriculars are being cut. Meanwhile, enrollment is on the rise.

Grubb said Hartford students have always performed above state averages on standardized tests, but teachers are very concerned about where the district is headed.

“I’m worried that we are moving toward mediocrity, and the kids’ achievement level is going to go down,” she said.

Posted November 21, 2003