Quality Control

Disclaimer: I'm pretty pissed right now.

I teach at Mervo, which if you have friends there know it's been going down the tubes as of late. The kids are out of control, and the teachers hate it there. We aren't supported by administration like many schools in this city. Teachers have been having issues that are common to most schools, but because we don't have an administration that can handle it thing escalate. Students are roaming the halls, smoking pot in the bathrooms, gambling/having sex in the stairwells and of course fighting constantly. It's Baltimore, it happens. I can control what happens in my classroom, I can get kids on task, get them seated, I can even break up a fight between the biggest of kids even being a small girl, but the things happening in the hallways I cannot control. That is where my administration is supposed to come in. They are supposed to support us by clearing the hallways, or at the very least implement rules that have teeth behind them so students don't feel as though nothing can touch them.

The first days of school we were told we can't suspend kids for any reason besides violent issues. We were told by our administrators, if something happens in your classroom it's your own issue. They wouldn't do anything but return the student right back to our classroom. How do you start a school year with rules like that?? If a student is disrespectful, fights with a student (but doesn't shed any blood), refuses to put away his/her iPod what are you supposed to do? They don't show up when I give them detention, they don't respond to parent phone calls, they don't respond to lowering their grades. They know, that no matter what, they can't get kicked out of school or suspended. Of course, the school is chaotic right now when you have rules with no real consequences. The teachers revolted, we all complained. We complain to our admins, to North Ave, some were ballsy enough to email Alonso himself.

North Ave has been in our building for weeks. Nothing has actually changed for the better. They put all of our admins on PIPs, which actually caused the students to riot and scream "F*ck North Ave right to their faces till they had to call in more police. Now North Ave's great solution is to have our admins put 50 out of 96 of us (Including me) on PIPs. I'm sure there are some awful teachers put on PIPs, but frankly I do not think our admins would be able to tell the difference between the good and the bad. Yes, I get the obligatory twice a semester observation but that is crap too. My department head walks in halfway through my lesson, looks around for 10 minutes, then leaves. What kind of observation is that? How can you really tell if I am a decent teacher, let a lone a teacher that needs to be put on a PIP based on that? The most frustrating part about this is that the admins know they have an awful way of evaluating us, which is why they picked the 50 teachers based solely on attendance. I have had 7 absences this school year. Some may say this is high, but then you realize I WAS HIT BY A CAR!!! Of course I took days off; I was in the hospital, my skull was exposed, and my foot was fractured. You try going back to work the very next day. This is apparently the case for many of the other teachers at my school. The teachers of Mervo haven't been the luckiest in terms of health. The teacher who took off because she has cancer= PIP, the teacher who had to take off to have bleeding cysts on her uterus removed=PIP, the teacher who was put on bed rest for a month after a painful back surgery=PIP. Thanks North Ave for not only pissing us off, but for making us feel like we are in the least supported environment possible. Where something that is already traumatic and hard to deal with makes you worry that you'll lose your job over it too.

Moral of the story...we need real quality control. We need admins who actually evaluate us appropriately, and North Ave. to stop requiring quotas for PIPs but rather have real solutions to real problems. We need the people in charge to be able to control the quality of the school and the quality of our teachers other than basing it off of an arbitrary thing such as legitimate absences.