by Jamil Ragland CTNewsJunkie
HARTFORD, CT – The Connecticut Education Association (CEA) released its annual online survey Tuesday afternoon, and educators around the state revealed that they are suffering from burnout, low pay, and issues with student discipline.
“If you know a teacher, you know somebody who bought school supplies for another person’s child,” said Kate Dias, president of the CEA. “If you know a teacher, you know somebody who paid out of pocket to ensure that their classroom was welcoming and kind to their students. If you know a teacher, you know somebody who bought snacks to make sure students didn’t go hungry. These are the little things that are really big in terms of making our schools the place our students need them to be. But that burden can’t solely sit on the shoulders of our teachers.”
The survey, conducted by GBAO, ran from October 22 through October 28. 5,016 members of the approximately 43,000 strong CEA responded to the survey. The top five issues for the respondents were stress and burnout (63%), low salaries (56%), problems with student behavior (55%), not feeling respected professionally (36%) and politicians/non-educator making classroom decisions (35%).
These conditions, said Rep. Chris Poulos, D-Southington, have helped to contribute to a difficult work conditions which drive people away from the education profession. Napoli also works as a high school teacher in Redding.
“It’s not just in my hometown or the district where I teach or in the state of Connecticut, but it’s nationwide that we are facing teacher shortage crisis in our country, ”he said. “Everyone agrees that we need to work to find ways to attract and retain people into our profession. There’s no silver bullet that’s going to bring and populate our profession overnight but a good place to start is with young people.”
Napoli suggested that the legislature look at ways to alleviate some of the financial burdens that are involved with earning teaching certification, such as the cost of licensure or the cost of some of the standardized tests that are involved in certifying a teacher.
Elsa Batista, a teacher in Newington, spoke about the many ways that teachers go above and beyond for their students.
“Teaching is such a rewarding profession,” she said. “We love what we do but with that said, if you’re not in the classroom, if you can’t spend a day in our shoes, please know that we wear many hats. Oftentimes I teach more than just Spanish. We teach students how to be compassionate with one another. We teach social skills, we teach empathy.”
She said that teaching is a very emotional job, and the energy she and her colleagues expend on students often comes at the expense of what they can do for their own families when they get home.
“We love what we do, but we’re getting tired,” she said.
Jeff Morrissey, president of the Bridgeport Educators Association, said that there are critical shortages of teachers in special education, math, science, and English for speakers of other languages in his hometown, and that the shortages are negatively affecting both students and staff.
“It is of the utmost importance to have a certified teacher in every classroom, but that’s nearly impossible when you consider, as it has been uttered here earlier, the expense, education, and effort that go into certification and the low salaries and high stress of this career,” he said.
He called on the state legislature to accelerate its support of teachers, by passing a statewide minimum starting salary of $60,000 for new teachers and providing adequate funding for regular salary increases. Otherwise, he said, teachers faced the reality of working multiple jobs to make ends meet.
“To provide for my own family, personally, I myself have worked on golf courses, bartended, tutored, and weighted tables on nights and weekends,” he said.
Joslyn DeLancey, vice president of the CEA, noted that there have been changes to teacher evaluations and DCF reporting requirements to make the job less stressful, but said that wasn’t enough.
“The one thing that those changes haven’t been is financial, and I think that that is the critical understanding that we need to invest in our public schools,” she said. “We’ve talked about class size, we’ve talked about salary, we’ve talked about funding for special education. We should be focusing on our para-educators too as well, we need those strong and supported in our schools.
So what we need to be doing is making sure that this session, when we start talking about policy and legislation, that a priority is funding our public schools and directing those funds in the places that will impact our students so that they can be successful.”