9486 in the collection  

Pearl Creek turns down state bonuses

Kudos. It is good to know that for some people honor is more important than money. Take a few minutes to write them a letter of thanks for standing up for the profession:

Mary Short, princpal
Pearl Creek Elementary
700 Auburn Dr
Fairbanks, AK 99709

They seem to be striving to live up to the school's mission statement:



Pearl Creek is a community of learners where everyone's unique qualities are accepted and optimal growth is achieved through explorations and cooperation in a safe, respectful, and caring environment.




By Robinson Duffy

The teachers and staff at Pearl Creek Elementary School are telling the state thanks, but no thanks as far as the school’s recently awarded incentive bonuses are concerned.

The staff at the local school want the state to know they appreciate being recognized for the good work they do teaching kids, but that they don’t want an extra monetary reward for doing what they’ve already been paid to do.

Pearl Creek was one of 42 schools across the state whose staff were recently awarded cash bonuses because of student improvement on standardized assessment tests.

All the teachers at Pearl Creek as well as the principal and other certified employees each received $2,500, while the school’s other staff, including librarians, custodians, and secretaries, received $1,000 each.

Principal Mary Short said she and her staff were glad the state was taking notice of the good work going on at the school, but that as a group the staff felt the cash bonuses were inappropriate.

“Most of the discussion was about how uncomfortable the incentive program made us feel,” Short said, referring to a staff meeting she convened the week before school started where the staff decided to donate the bonus money from the state to nonprofit organizations or to districtwide education initiatives. “Most felt that (the money) should go to other schools.”

Short said her staff’s reactions to the incentive program, which was designed to award school employees when the students’ test scores as a whole at a school showed substantial increases from the year before, ranged from embarrassment that they would receive the money while other teachers at other schools would not, to anger that the state would assume a few thousand dollars would motivate the teachers to do a better job.

“It’s not that the school staff are lacking motivation. We are motivated already,” Short said. “We were quite offended that they (the state Department of Education and the Legislature) thought we needed motivation.”

That was certainly not the intent behind the incentive program, Les Morse, the director of assessment for the state Department of Education, said.

The bonuses weren’t meant to be a motivator, but rather a gesture of appreciation for a job well done.

“I think it says, ‘You did a darn good job, thank you,’” he said. “And in Fairbanks, Pearl Creek did a darn good job. In 2007, half their kids that were not proficient became proficient.

“The school actually got the award for exactly what the state Legislature set up the program to reward,” he said. “High-performing kids staying high performing and kids who were not proficient crossing the line to proficiency.”

Morse said he doesn’t quite understand Pearl Creek staff’s aversion to the bonuses, but respects their decision to use the money any way they wished.

“They don’t have to accept the money,” he said.

The staff at Pearl Creek aren’t the only ones who don’t like the new incentive program, which was put in place this year and has been authorized by the Legislature for the next two years.

Bill Bjork, the president of the Alaska chapter of the National Education Association, an educators’ union, said in a statement that the incentive program was unfairly biased toward schools with small enrollment numbers.

To back up that assertion, Bjork pointed out that of the schools that made the most improvement under the program and hence earned the largest bonuses — $5,500 per teacher — 80 percent had student bodies with fewer than 20 students.

“For any kind of performance incentive pay program to make sense, it’s got to be accessible to all the schools — not just the very small, or schools that have favorable demographics,” Bjork said.

Morse said Bjork’s assessment of the program didn’t make sense if you looked at the complete list of schools receiving awards this year.

Large schools in Anchorage, Fairbanks and the Mat-Su Valley received the bonuses.

Fair or not, the staff at Pearl Creek plan to use the incentive bonuses for the good of the whole community, Short said.

Each staff member will make the decision of what organization to donate his or her bonus to.

Some have expressed interest in nonprofit agencies serving children, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, while others want to purchase art kits or other supplies to be available for teachers across the district.

Short said a group of her staff members will be writing letters to state officials and legislators discussing their displeasure with the incentive program and urging a different system.

“There’s got to be a more equitable way to support schools,” Short said.



— Robinson Duffy
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
2007-08-24


---

INDEX OF OUTRAGES

Pages: 380   
[1] 2 3 4 5 6  Next >>    Last >>