Thursday, December 6, 2018
Local News
The Calvert County Times
5
School Board Gets an Earful from Veteran Teachers
Complaints Involve Lack of Curriculum Development
By Dick Myers
Editor
The Calvert County Board of Education at their Nov.
29 meeting heard some pent-up frustration from about
a half dozen teacher members of the Calvert Educa-
tion Association (CEA), many of whom have been in
the classrooms for decades. The main complaints were
over lack of curriculum and textbooks and the time to
do everything required of them.
Association President Dona Ostenso explained that
the teachers still desire flexibility for decisions in the
classrooms, but they also seek some consistency in
what is being taught so that all students are on the same
page.
“They don’t have textbooks. They have no baseline,”
Ostenso told The County Times. She suspected the
school system is loath to purchase new textbooks for
fear they would be quickly outdated with today’s rapid-
ly changing body of knowledge in many subject areas.
At one point in the public comment section of the
meeting, 26-year veteran teacher Beth Roe of St. Leon-
ard Elementary School started pulling out of a box a
confusing array of materials she said she had been giv-
en as part of curriculum development. In the middle of
doing so with still more materials to show, she was cut
off because her allotted time had expired.
“That’s the story of our lives. We are out of time al-
ways,” she said.
Carol Howard, long-time teacher at Patuxent-Appeal
Elementary School noted the Citizens Advisory Com-
mittee’s focus of the Social, Emotional and Behavioral
(SEB) needs of students But, she noted the lack of “in-
struction and training” to deal with those issues, par-
ticularly for younger teachers.
Rantessa Anderson, an English teacher at Beach El-
ementary School, with 27 years of experience, said, “I
feel like a first-year teacher with the lack of reading
curriculum.” She said curriculum wasn’t defined as lists
of resources and lists of books for her students to read.
Anderson said teachers are feeling overwhelmed.
“We can only take so much,” she said.
St. Leonard Elementary School teacher Jeanette
Gionfrido used an example in television history to
make her point. She told of the “I Love Lucy” episode
in which Lucy and Ethel are working in a chocolate
factory and they had a hard time keeping up with the
assembly line. Chocolate was flying everywhere, and
they were stuffing it in their clothing and eating it to
try to keep up.
“This is how I feel in the demands placed on us,” she
said. She added, “I am overwhelmed with my lack of
curriculum.”
Gionfriddo said the disparity in tools available to
teachers from one school to the other “flies in the face
of equity” for all students.
Patty Todero, a Beach Elementary School teacher
with 33 years of experience said her job is more dif-
ficult now, with all of the experience, than it was when
she first started. “Teachers are struggling with tasks”
Calvert Education Association President Dona Ostenso
she said, because of the lack of learning materials.
“Lack of resources and curriculum are putting a bur-
den on teachers who don’t have the time,” said Summer
Byers, a Patuxent-Appeal E.S. teacher with 18 years of
experience, in summing up the concerns expressed by
her colleagues.
The school board, as is their practice, did not respond
to any of the public comments made at the meeting.
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