THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604260021
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines
When I went to high school we had a principal, an assistant principal and two part-time counselors. My school had about 1,800 students and served six grades, 7 through 12.
Western Branch Middle School in Chesapeake has about 1,600, serves three grades, 6, 7 and 8 and is staffed by four principals (a principal and three assistants), four counselors (a lead and three assistants) and a full-time security person.
Do the students at Western Branch Middle School have so many behavioral and emotional problems that they need this many principals and counselors plus a security person? Do the teachers need this much supervision? I don't think so, and I'll bet most of your readers' schools were similar to mine.
What do all these principals and counselors do to fill their day? My guess is that they call a lot of meetings and send a lot of memos - taking valuable teaching time away from the teachers. But, I'm told, this administrative staffing level is ``allowed'' by the state, so why not do it?
Excessive administrative staffing has another serious impact by reducing the number of teachers the school system can afford. The result is overcrowded classrooms. At this school, for example, some seventh-grade classes have about 35 students - too many for much individual attention and too many for effective team groupings within the classroom. What a difference it would make if some of these assistant-principle and counselor positions were converted to teaching positions.
If this administrative structure is typical of most schools in Chesapeake (or Hampton Roads), I strongly suspect that a huge bureaucracy also exists at school-administration headquarters to provide ``supervision'' for the layers of school principles, counselors and their many assistants.
Apart from the poor use of local taxes, administrative overstaffing partly answers the sad question as to why our schools often do not keep up with national scholastic averages. The focus has to be on one thing - teaching. And all of our administrative efforts should be directed toward providing more teachers, better (and better paid) teachers and more time to teach.
Our school systems now mirror the conditions of many of the country's largest corporations a few years ago - unable to compete because of large, unproductive personnel overhead. We now need painful corporate downsizing in our schools to redirect the limited resources back to teaching and the efficient yet nurturing production of one of our most-important products - well-educated children.
PAUL C. DaVIA
Chesapeake, April 5, 1996 by CNB