PERTH AMBOY – The current remote schedules for middle school and high school students and staff are unsustainable. If you were able to go into their Google classrooms you would see the strain and exhaustion of the faces of our students and staff. On top of the full day of teaching, teachers spend hours completing paperwork and preparing and digitizing their remote lessons. There is also the expectation that teachers must show up after their contractual day to retrieve materials. This is unacceptable. 

Adding to this pressure, grading windows for report cards and progress reports have been reduced to an unreasonably short amount of time. Teachers have complained about this, and the union has complained about this. The response from the district is the teachers should be inputting grades all along. That ignores the fact that teachers are allowing their students to make up missing work. We understand that this is all difficult for our students, too. And truthfully, what possible harm is there in keeping the grading window open longer. Teachers should not have to spend hours after school trying to complete a task that teachers from other districts can do in a leisurely manner. 

After the rush to get report cards done, high school teachers must then go through a maze of documentation to show that they did everything possible to help their students pass the class. This process can take hours. This task also has an unreasonable deadline. Almost every teacher task in this district comes with an unreasonable deadline. 

Middle and High School teachers are also losing their preps to cover classes. In most cases, it has not been voluntary. Yes, they are being paid for a missed prep, but teachers desperately need their prep periods to prepare and upload quality remote lessons, contact parents, grade assignments, upload grades, do report cards, return emails, speak with other colleagues, attend IEP meetings, attend PLCs, and to digitize their current resources. We are petitioning for more planning time for our Middle and High School teachers. The amount of work our teachers are tasked is enormous. 

We requested from central that teachers and paraprofessional be given time on a rotating schedule during their contractual workday to pick up supplies that they need from their classrooms to be used for instruction for our students for the second marking period. No one in central answered our request. 

We also have paraprofessionals who need laptops because the ones they got from the district in the spring no longer work. Our students need their paraprofessionals, and our paraprofessional need laptops. 

On a related note, you can see that we are losing more great teachers on this agenda… through retirement and resignation. This should concern all of us. 

Pat Paradiso 

President Perth Amboy Federation