Care Less

The school district has employee childcare available and sign-up as the coming year is approaching. That’s sign-up for fifty spots on a first come, first-served basis. Now I’m not a math teacher, but there are over three thousand teachers working in this district. Fifty spots just don’t seem like quite enough to accommodate.

I wish the district would take a page out of, well, its own book and dump a whole bunch of more kids on the childcare workers. What? Why not? Kids get dumped on us all the time and public education has irresponsibly flirted with babysitting for the masses for years.

I mean it. Our focus has shifted away from academics. The 50 Rule confirms that, and it’s not like social promotion is Big Foot. It exists. So, what does that leave us with? They’re with us for hours almost every day. We feed these kids, and don’t be too sure that it isn’t the only meal they get. We model and try to correct behavior. They spend a huge chunk of extracurricular time with us. At times, they will open up to us like their lives depended on it.

And all for less than five dollars an hour (way less).

Incidentally, when I was on the district’s Web site looking at our numbers, I noticed it read that the student/teacher ratio is twelve. Twelve! That’s preposterous! I can’t tell you the last time I had less than thirty-two kids in my classroom. Wait, strike that. There were a couple of days a few years ago when I had about twelve kids. That was when that bad batch of Frito pie was served in the cafeteria. Students were dropping like flies.