Teachers' union: Sioux Falls admins should rebuild trust after bungled scheduling process
Shelly Conlon
Sioux Falls School District administrators are trying to repair trust and set the record straight after what some called a bungled process to rework elementary school schedules for next year.
Administrators say the final plan boils down to losing five minutes per week in so-called "specials" classes like art, music, P.E. and library. But parents, teachers and the teachers' union say the changes have broader impacts, and they're frustrated they weren't more involved in the decision-making process.
“It’s like we’re shown a product, we give feedback, and then they go behind a curtain and do stuff,” Tony Martinet, president of the Sioux Falls Education Association said. “You don't get to see the mess. ...If from the start, they would have simply said, ‘We are cutting minutes to music, P.E. and art because we're trying to equalize across the board,’ and just owned it from the start, then I mean, the frustration and the arguments would have not have been there.”
Martinet, along with other educators, spoke with the Argus Leader about the controversial schedule changes nearly a week after district officials announced the final decision.
Martinet and others also urged the Sioux Falls school board multiple times to consider weighing in, but administrators have continuously said the board would not make a decision because the process is an administrative function.
How did we get here?
The district hired a consultant in fall 2018 to advise administration and rework what they called "chaotic" schedules for teachers, especially for those moving between buildings on a regular basis. The consultant received $181,000 to do so with the help of its own software program.
In early April, a leaked draft schedule caused controversy among parents and the public, who were upset about proposed cuts to fine arts class time.
More:Consultant tied to proposed fine arts class time cuts faced criticism in other states
But Assistant Superintendent Teresa Boysen said the focus wasn't just on minutes in certain classes, it was about how to "educate that whole child."
"Between 8 a.m. and 2:45 p.m., we have a whole lot to get done for those kiddos, and to make sure we meet all of their needs," said Boysen, who led the planning process behind the schedule changes.
To make that happen, the district had to figure out how to get all specials teachers in school buildings at the same time, and that meant evaluating more than 700 individual schedules, she said.
What does the new schedule look like?
Currently, art, music and P.E. courses are each 70 minutes, and library is 35 minutes. Right now, students get about 245 minutes total for all of those classes each week, though some days students may not have a special at all, Boysen said.
“People think that (students) have 8,000 minutes of specials a year. But they could have 7,000, you could have 7,500,” she said. “Nobody gets all of them.”
Because of the previous schedule, students missed anywhere from 525 minutes to 1,050 minutes of specials on holidays or other days without school, she said.
The new schedule ensures 48 minutes of specials daily, no matter the specials subject, for a total of 240 minutes weekly. The subjects themselves will just rotate every four days, she said. On the fifth day, things start over.
Overall, students lose about three hours of specials class time over the year, but week-to-week it's about the same, officials said.
More:Officials: Sioux Falls students won't lose fine arts class time in schedule change
Teachers: Schedule changes have broad impacts
Teachers say the math is misleading because administration may not have counted the number of days in the school calendar accurately. Boysen confirmed the district used 180 days to calculate the schedule change, compared to the 172 teacher say students actually have.
Educators also said the impact of 48-minute classes is broader than officials let on.
“We will be asking 5-year-olds to now sit in an art, music, P.E. or library class for 48 minutes and stay attentive for the entire block of time, in each class,” orchestra teacher Louisa Biteler said. “Not one educator would say this is ‘best practice.’"
As of the last week of May, educators had already been asked to figure out what curriculum to adjust for the next year, administrators confirmed and teachers said. But Boysen argued it’s not a curriculum change, but a pacing change.
More:Community pushes back as Sioux Falls considers cuts to fine arts class time
Teachers will have to think about things like shifting a lesson further up in the year or expanding on another, spokeswoman DeeAnn Konrad said.
“It's not changing what we're teaching," Konrad said. "We do that through a curriculum review every seven years."
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Elementary librarians may see the biggest change with the new schedule as they look to spend more time teaching longer classes and less time pulling books and doing research for students and staff.
The change will also limit the number of classes librarians teach to six a day, some of whom taught seven or more a day, Boysen said.
“The other half of our job is gone,” Terry Redlin librarian Kristie Schreck said.
The district will have to hire about two more full-time librarians to help handle the load, despite officials previously stating staffing wouldn't change with the new schedules. Librarians, whose classes have always been considered a special, might also have to rely more on their educational assistants, Boysen said.
Officials still called the change cost-neutral, though, because the positions aren’t in addition to the total number of positions for the new year. Instead, they will replace other positions the district won’t be filling because someone retired or left, Boysen said.
The new schedule also includes 30 more minutes of intervention time and 30 more minutes of collaboration time daily for teachers.
District 'simply cannot' get feedback from everyone
Biteler's biggest complaint with the new schedules is the process with which they were decided.
She said the district's reasons for the schedule change regularly shifted over the past two months, from improving reading scores to adjusting chaotic schedules to the ultimate goal of providing equity.
She and others asked questions about what changes would look like in classrooms day-to-day and whether data for a successful change like this existed, but they never received answers, she said. Other teachers declined to speak to the Argus Leader for fear of retribution.
Sometimes, officials responded by saying teachers knew more than they did, she said.
That lack of transparency is one of the reasons she’s choosing to leave the district this year and go to a private school. She’s still weighing whether to keep her children – three of whom are elementary age -- in the school system, she said.
“I want to believe Dr. Boysen, that this is what’s best for kids, but the information hasn’t been straightforward and honest,” Biteler said. “Those emails have not been answered by anyone, and as a parent that concerns me. Those questions need to be answered, then we can make honest decisions with honest answers.”
But the district defended its process.
Administrators had eight months of study and held 11 feedback sessions involving classroom teachers, specials teachers, parents, community member, principals, Boysen said. The district also received more than 1,500 suggestion and comment cards and reviewed and considered three different schedule drafts.
Boysen even said her last informational meeting was an invitation to anyone within the district who had questions, and only about 20 showed up.
“We simply cannot have 700 elementary teachers at a meeting (all at once), trying to give feedback and have it being meaningful,” Konrad said.
How can the district begin to heal?
A decision has been made on the schedules, but Martinet says administrators should work closely with teachers to ensure they'll have more of a voice in the finer details of the process.
He wants administrators to work on explaining the methodology behind decisions and evaluations about the schedule, he said. And he would like the district to simply acknowledge that some of the challenges teachers mentioned do indeed exist.
“I can probably find you five to 10 teachers who are like, ‘I'm going to really enjoy this schedule,’" Martinet said. "I can find your five to 10 who are like, ‘we're willing to give it a shot.’ But we want to know that the district is open to reconsidering. And I can find five to 10 more who are like horribly, ‘No, we don't want this at all.”
Boysen said she wouldn’t do anything differently but would just continue to move forward and answer questions. And the commitment to open lines of communication has never changed, Konrad said. Principals will be working with individual campuses to work out the finer details before school starts.
If for whatever reason the schedule isn’t successful, the district will reevaluate again next year because schedules are something the district looks at annually anyway, officials said.
“We’re not going to have 100 percent agreement with whatever decision we make, right?” Boysen said. “We listened to feedback, we changed, we adapted and will continue to do that. And knowing that whatever decision we make, we're making for the decision for based on kids, because that's what we're about.”