Is the money from Question 1 actually going to fund classrooms?
Yes, the operating levy goes to classrooms. But “classroom” means more than the teacher at the front of the room.
Having the right people, tools, and expertise to meet our goals comes down to sound financial planning and resource management. We need revenue that lets us stop cutting and start rebuilding, including hiring the teachers needed to ease the strain in our classrooms right now.
Lower class sizes alone won’t solve it. Behavior challenges and the individualized support each student needs can’t fall on one person. Teachers need direct support in their buildings from people who work alongside them every day. They also need district-level coordination so that support reaches the right buildings and the right students, and so our resources are used efficiently.
Take our deans of students. Director Lisa Atkinson has argued they’re administrators. In her words, deans “are focused on managing behavior, not teaching them reading, math or science,” and “the fact is they are not teachers.”
But in the same thread, she defined what she’s protecting. “Classroom means a teacher with a license to teach.”
Director Atkinson acknowledged that our deans are classified as Teachers on Special Assignment. Under our teacher contract, teachers on special assignment stay in the teachers’ bargaining unit, which covers positions that require a teaching license. The only administrators it excludes are superintendents and principals. By Director Atkinson’s own definition, deans are the classroom.
And when a dean steps in to handle a disruption, the classroom teacher keeps teaching reading, math, and science to everyone else. That’s not a cost to the classroom. That’s what protects it. Our current teacher contract even includes a staff safety agreement because teachers reported a rise in student dysregulation and physical behavior. Deans are part of how we respond.
She also defined administration as “anyone who is NOT a teacher.” That would count paraprofessionals, counselors, nurses, and special education staff as overhead. It’s not a fair measure. It’s a way to make a number look bigger than it is.
The same argument gets made about district-level positions. Spend the money on teachers, the argument goes, not on people who plan.
But planning doesn’t disappear when you cut the planner. It lands on the people doing the work. Consider our system of student supports. Someone has to decide which students need extra help, what that help looks like, and whether it’s working, consistently across every building. If no one at the district level owns that, it falls on teachers and principals, on top of everything they already do.
Think of a hospital. The doctors and nurses are the experts, and the care happens in their hands. But someone has to coordinate between departments, track outcomes across the whole hospital, and figure out what needs to improve. No one expects a surgeon to do that while operating. Teachers are the experts in our classrooms. District coordination lets them focus on students, and evaluation tells us whether what we’re doing is actually working.
If we want to be sure every dollar is well spent, someone has to be checking.