Is the Chamber of Commerce Against Public Schools?

Dear Fellow Teachers and Friends,

As Senator Booher continues to cover his tracks recently with school administrators and teachers another one of our colleagues has called him out on his inability to have solid information on the education system. Please read the letter written below by Mrs. Tara Donzell of Cadillac.

With Permission from the author she does want this letter to spread to her fellow colleagues. Happy reading and sending. May I remind you to use this information to inform our community about the unethical behavior these officials are acting and promote the need to invest in our childrens’ education not cut it.

PS: I am so proud as she did observations in my classroom during her undergrad.. oh yes…and I was the one the Senator felt the need to poke his finger into through his frustration regarding my questioning of his educational leadership and his recent votes to cut K-12 funding.

-Scott Koenig
Social Sciences Teacher

Hello Senator.

I was at the luncheon at Crystal Mountain on Friday and I did not have the opportunity to ask you some questions I had due to the limited time allotted to hear from your “public”. I am a parent and a public school teacher who has some real concerns about your skewed view on education. You might very well be a farmer/banker with a big heart for exchange students and the Evart Public School system, but you clearly have no idea what teachers are dealing with.

Your statistic about the 76% of Evart grads having to take remedial courses at college was staggering. But, did you ever stop to think that it is amazing in our non-accountability culture that most of them even graduated high school? When the government is bailing out banks, and parents are losing jobs left and right, how can they possibly be supportive of education at home? There is no accountability in our culture, from parents, to (some) teachers, to administrators, to our elected officials.

I am sure that about 80% of that 76% you touted had a lot of terrible days in school. I am sure they faced things you have never dreamed of dealing with in your idyllic farm life as a teenager. These are the things I see almost daily: hungry kids, kids having a toothache, kids breaking up with an s/o, kids losing a parent, or both in three months time, kids being neglected and/or abused by parents who lost their job and took up drinking to fill 8 hours a day, kids who are/were raped/molested, kids who have closed head injuries, kids who are/were getting special education services, kids that have illnesses that had them out of school for days out of every week, but don’t’ tell their parents or go to the doctor because they know their parents cannot afford the medical bills. Some kids are bullied to the extent that they don’t want to go to school.

Let’s just focus on bullying for an instant. Bullying is far from being handled in our society. In fact, I heard about another educator who had a finger poked into his chest by an unnamed elected official this past Saturday. I cannot imagine that if those types of intimidating behaviors are being exhibited and accepted in our legislation. But it appears they are. I suppose that those same behaviors cannot possibly be happening in homes across this great state, or in the hallways where teachers’ eyes are not.

I know that you have “the kids'” best interests at heart, but I think your decisions are saying otherwise. I know that you have no idea that I have dealt with each and every thing listed above in the last week in my very own junior high classroom. I cannot imagine what it would be like for me to do my job if I knew that we had enough counselors, enough intervention programs, enough parental support, and enough governmental support to make sure that each and every child has the basic things they needed to be emotionally, physically and mentally healthy enough to be successful in my classroom. But, that is never going to happen with men in charge who have a completely blame-shifting “business friendly” bullying bent on everything they do.

Here are the questions that I wished to pose on Friday:
1) If our district has been a “teaching district” for budget cutting, and the only thing left to cut is teachers-how do you propose we teach kindergartners to read when there will be 40 kids in a classroom? Or how can we teach special education students math and writing with 30 kids in a classroom?
2) If arts music and athletics are cut from our schools, how can we create a well-rounded citizens who can become a part of the work-force?
3) Lansing is all about jobs and creating a business friendly environment, however with current cuts to education, how can we produce good workers?

I realize we have a funding problem in our state, and I realize it needs to change, but I fail to see that the only way to do that is by short-changing our children. What future will Michigan have if our public schools are let to have the same problems, but with less funding to support the efforts? I am willing to pay for my insurance, I am willing to take a pay freeze for a year, and I am willing to think of a lot of other ways to fix this problem, but it appears that those in Lansing are not. What if the child tax credit and welfare money were tied to school involvement? I think that would be a BIG step in the accountability direction. Thank you for your time and for your service to our state. I hope you make some good decisions for EVERYONE in Michigan and help our schools instead of blaming them.

TED