To the Editor:
Regarding teacher pay and working conditions in Fairfax County:
As a 10-year resident of Fairfax County and employee of Fairfax County Public Schools, I have been around long enough to see the good and the bad. I’ve been paid well enough to buy my own home and start a family, but I’ve also seen budget woes shrink my class sizes and send me in search of classes to teach at other schools in order to remain full time. Currently we face another round of belt tightening, and before we go through that again, I feel the voices of our educators need to be heard.
For the first half of my career, my job just got easier and easier as I gained skill and mastered my presentation of the curriculum. To top it all off, I got paid progressively more and more. For the last five years, however, my job has gotten harder and harder, and I have been paid less and less. We have faced federal, state, and local pressure to increase testing of our students, which inherently takes away from the time we actually spend educating them. Our enrollment in Fairfax continues to increase, as our county is an economic engine for the state and our school system a model for the nation. However, having just prepared my 2013 taxes and comparing them to the figures from 2012, it is clear that I and my wife, also a teacher, made several thousand dollars less last year compared to the year before, largely due to the state-mandated changes to the Virginia Retirement System. We are literally doing more work for less money.
I do not intend to make this entirely an issue of pay. My family prepares a budget every year, and we always take into account the step increase printed on the salary scale for a given year. Even if we receive no adjustment for increases in cost of living, I can make sure that my family will be provided for, as long as our step increase is guaranteed. As teachers, my wife and I are both well aware that our compensation, including benefits, will more than cover our basic needs. My primary concern is with the level of work we are being asked to do.
Next year we face another round of increased testing and increased class sizes, which shrink the number of classes we teach at our base schools and send us out searching for more classes to teach around the county. This is not only a disservice to us, as employees of FCPS, but above all to the students. In the darkest days of the last budget crunch, I taught a class with 38 students officially on the roster. Over 40 attempted to sign up, but rather than being split into two classes, several students were turned away, asked to take up study of another subject. I fear that this sort of travesty will play out again next year, not only for myself, but for countless other students and teachers across the county.
If FCPS wishes to maintain its stellar reputation as an educational model for our local area and the nation, it must make ensuring reasonable class sizes a priority. It seems that the Virginia General Assembly may finally be reducing the testing burden our students and educators face, which is encouraging. We may need to, if necessary, forgo cost of living increase for another year. Speaking for myself, this I can tolerate, so long as we receive our promised step increase. What we cannot do is pile more work on our teachers and continue to pay them less. We cannot pile more students into the classroom and expect the level of excellence in education to which we have become accustomed in Fairfax. Speaking for the average teacher in our schools, we must insist that the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors fund our schools at the level requested by Dr. Garza and the School Board.
Glenn M. Rife
German Teacher
Westfield High school