‘Where’s the Data?’ Parents, Teachers Ask D161 of Teacher Transfer Initiative

Parents and teachers piled into Normandy Villa Elementary School on Monday looking for time and answers, but filed out looking disappointed.

Despite the entreaty, members of the Board of Education unanimously approved a controversy initiative that will shuffle teachers between schools based, as board president David Dreyfuss put it, on the district’s “need for educational balance, the need to move forward with our current technology plan.”

That plan over several upcoming terms, beginning with fourth and seventh grades.

Nor did a petition boasting 120 signatures convince the board to delay voting for one month so that parents and teachers—particularly those of Western Avenue Elementary, which some say is the best of the neighborhood school system—could better understand the reasoning behind the transfers.

Reading from a statement, Superintendent Craig Doster said 52 teachers volunteered to be a part of the early technology initiative and therefore needed to be moved whole grade levels and schools. That made openings on other grade levels and schools, he said, causing the administration to fill gaps based on teacher’s strengths and each school’s needs.

Doster said there had been discussions ahead of time with the teacher union leaders about the transfers, adding, “No moves were punitive.”

“From teacher collaboration and building from one another’s strengths, I am confident that … student achievement will increase as we move towards the demands of the twenty-first century,” he said.

But it was a lack of communication about the technology plan and the method by which teachers were told of their transfers that apparently bothered so many to come out. Some said they were asked to wait in their classrooms following parent-teacher conference day and could hear others crying, in other rooms, as administrators made their rounds.

The most impassioned line of questioning during the meeting came from Lil Artus, a special education teacher with only one year left to go before retirement.

“Change is great, let me tell you,” she said of the transfer announcement. “But the way it was done was cruel. It was demeaning. I feel an apology is owed to teachers, all teachers from the staff in every building, for how it was done. It was wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Though he received no formal reply, Steve Paredes, a reading specialist at Western, asked the board to show the “empirical” and “pedagogical” evidence of its technology plan, its details and demands on teachers, timeline and alternatives—all as a measurement of “stakeholder confidence” and “student performance.”

“We tell our students that it is important to cite our sources, and I could not agree more,” he said. “We think that this should start at top.”

Dreyfuss said public forums on the technology plan were forthcoming, noting that more information would be posted on the district website.

“I think there was not as much communication as could have occurred related to that,” he said, “but I think there was a certain amount of excitement related and everybody was very pleased with the potential there.”

He continued: “Please understand the moves were made with the best of intentions … Don’t begin to focus on the negative related to the technology [plan] and question why we’re moving forward with this because of personnel issues.”

Of all the night’s speakers, probably the most encouraging comment came from Eric January, a Homewood man whose children go to Flossmoor Hills and who said he wanted to see each school on the same level.

“Shake it up,” he said. “...I believe the kids are certainly going to adjust easier than the adults.”