Scarsdale High PTA Chief: Staffing is a Concern

We appreciate the work of the Board of Education and want to reiterate our concern about critically considering all of the programs in the budget and preparing for the future to ensure and maintain high educational standards in all grades in the school district.

If we put the statistics aside, the fact remains that eight academic positions have been cut from the high school while enrollment is growing. If we estimate that each of those teachers would have had a class load of approximately four sections while the number of students remained stable, then what happened to those 30-plus sections? With regards to hiring, the school has all of the predictive tools necessary to anticipate student movement and to figure out staffing needs. Our concern is how are we going to pay for a last minute hire? How are we going to ensure that we hire the best qualified high school certified teacher that we can when we need to?

The school district continues to invest in teacher training, innovation and consultants to make sure our teachers are the best they can be and to enable them to offer opportunities for our students to think critically and creatively, yet how can our teachers be expected to implement these strategies when they have more students and less time to spend with them?

In the training I received when I earned my Masters in education, I learned the importance of preparation. The bottom line concern of the high school executive board is that we want to know that the Board of Education has critically evaluated current programming and is preparing for the short and long term.

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