Comments to the Board of Education intended for Thursday, May 15 submitted by Kim Pennings, Greenwich Public School Teacher
I’m here tonight to deliver a strange sort of love letter. I love my job, I love my students, I love this town and I’m grateful for the hard work the Board of Education has done and is about to do. I’m up here tonight, not because I think it will change things, I’m too discouraged for that because of what has already taken place. But I think it’s important to be part of the record and a witness to what is being done: As a resident of Greenwich, a parent of students, and a teacher at GHS, I don’t see the value of these cuts, I see a slow death by a thousand cuts.
We all know that the teaching profession relies on a lot of free labor, and it is my free labor that will make all these cuts possible. I, and teachers like me, will directly bear the costs.
I run the critical discourse club at GHS, which has 15-30 members on any given Thursday discussing philosophical issues for an hour after school. I used to have flex time for running a club, but now, I do it for free because I love your kids.
I run the National English Honor Society with 157 members. We have elections and run a freshman mentoring program. I do that for free, because I love your kids.
I assign essays every 2-3 weeks regularly as preparation for the AP exam, essays on which I should only spend 5 minutes grading each, but I often spend at least 10, because I love your kids. And with 96 essays, that’s 16 hours of work, 4 times a marking period. During the day, I have meetings and study halls to run and classes to teach, so I grade after school and on weekends, for free, because I love your kids.
I’m about to lose access to 10 years of time-consuming data entry that I’ve done in the Schoology platform we just cut. If I want next year to go smoothly, I’d better be working on downloading and transferring my materials to Google Classroom, a process which will take weeks, and which I will do for free because I love your kids.
When asked, my own two children say , “You love us too, but you work ALL THE TIME.” Tonight, I’m missing my daughter’s first high school performance on opening night of “The Little Mermaid,” so I can be here to stand up for your kids.
I’m really tired, but that love for teaching your children is sustaining me. I don’t have room in my life to take on the portion of the house administrator, the dean, the learning facilitator, and the counselor that will inevitably become mine as responsibilities are passed down the ladder for me to do for free.
I’ve watched us choose not to CUT English teachers but just quietly not hire replacements when they retire, resulting in the quiet growth of my class sizes and the quiet loss of my free time as it gets quietly eaten by my free labor.
So I can’t stay quiet tonight. I need to speak of the consequences of these cuts because I bear them personally.
I have near-perfect attendance by the way. I took one day off this entire year, because I was too ill to get to work, not to fly to Italy (as we were once publicly accused of doing). But as I lay in bed, I was still grading essays because I love your kids. I would like to know how many lawyers, bankers, or even educational consultants give away over 300 hours of pro bono work every year out of love for your kids.
Teachers like me are part of the problem: we make you believe that we can keep doing more with less. There will come a point when less is just less. I have no more free time to give you. It will just mean less for your kids.