Kudzu Queen

By Tamara Ducote

Alphonse has been keeping track of the teacher shortage situation in Mobile, and doing nervous calculations. Alphonse is a friend and fellow teacher. He is also an excellent chess player, and the fact that he gave me $10 has absolutely nothing to do with me stating this unrelated fact concerning his chess prowess. Really.

According to Alphonse’s latest number crunching, class sizes will be inflated this year. We teachers can expect roughly 14 gazillion students in our classes. This is a lot of children to not leave behind. I’m wondering where I’m even going to find enough chairs for all of those behinds.

The school board is trying to address the situation. The board is raising the pay rate for substitute teachers. This is an excellent idea. Competent subs are a godsend. It would be OK with me if the school board wanted to offer subs $5,000 per day, lifetime Club Med memberships and limo rides to and from the schools. Whatever it takes to get them there.

The school board is also offering a $1,000 bonus to retired certified teachers who will agree to teach 85 days or more. This is undoubtedly well intentioned, but I don’t see it working. Mainly because retired certified teachers, for the most part, are not clinically insane.

This situation has me seriously questioning whether or not I take enough psychotropic medication.

From high school through graduate school, I worked in a variety of restaurants. I suggest the school board borrow the restaurant model. In a restaurant, your regular job might be waiting tables, bartending, cooking or even managing the whole enterprise. Inevitably, there are times when staffing is short. What happens is that everybody, regardless of job title, pitches in to cover the shortage.

When the dishwasher calls in sick or the clean-up man gets his parole revoked, their jobs still need to be done. Many a maitre’d or manager have found themselves running the dish machine, mopping floors, even cleaning out the godawfully nasty little metal boxes in the ladies’ rooms. Restaurant people know when your crew is short and the rush is on, it’s time to put aside job descriptions and just get the job done.

Because everybody is rowing on the same boat, and if it goes down, we’re all out of work anyway. This might not be fun, exactly (especially cleaning out those nasty little metal boxes), but it does work. This collaborative effort probably occurs more often in smaller restaurants, but trust me, even in an enormous establishment, there is going to come a time when you are asked to do something you weren’t specifically hired to do, for the simple reason that it needs to be done.

There are an awful lot of people working for the school system whose jobs entail walking through the schools with clipboards and checklists, documenting deficiencies in the classrooms. I’ve met some of these people, and they appear to be bright and competent. Perhaps all of them are. Certainly they are experts in educational practices, or else they wouldn’t have these jobs, right?

What a wonderful gesture of goodwill it would be if some of the Barton administrators laid down their clipboards and came down to the trenches, I mean classrooms, to assist during this teacher shortage. This action would effectively say to teachers, parents, and the community: It really IS all about the children, and right now these children need teachers. Here I am. Let me help in a meaningful way.

What else are these people going to be doing, otherwise? It hardly takes a cadre of clip-boarders to note that overcrowded classrooms result in chaos and a less-than-optimal learning environment.

Our school system recently added a slew of supervisory positions to its upper tier. I wonder how well an army would run if it had lots of generals but a shortage of infantrymen? We sure could use some of these generals down here in the field. Just for a little while, until the next crop of new teachers graduates.

I don’t think I’m asking the Barton-ites to do anything radical or unreasonable. It’s not like I’m asking them to clean out the little metal boxes in the ladies’ rooms. I’m just asking them to remember we’re all in this together, and we’ve got a whole lot of kids on this boat with us. The kids are depending upon us to get them where they need to be. They trust us not to let the ship founder.

Are you willing to dip your oar into the water and row? Your clipboard might get a little wet, but I don’t think the kids will mind.

Contact Tamara Ducote at TDDucote6@aol.com.

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