John Matthews
WMAL.com
ROCKVILLE — (WMAL) Summer is still chugging along for school children in Maryland, but for teachers, the fall frost has arrived.
Wednesday is the first day of the new school year for teachers, who will have ample time to get ready for the arrival of students on September 5th – the day after Labor Day.
“We have eight work days before we see the students this year, instead of having four normally. ” explains Jan Guttman, an alternative education teacher at Rockville’s Wood Middle School.
In past years, teachers were provided with four workdays to put their classrooms together, attend faculty meetings and prepare for students, but under the new school calendar mandated by Governor Larry Hogan’s executive order to start classes after Labor Day, teachers now have eight days of prep time.
The county’s contract with teachers mandates a certain number of professional days to be built into the school calendar. Under the previous schedule, those days were spread throughout the year, but with the new mandate to provide 180 days of instruction between Labor Day and June 15th, many counties, including Montgomery, have stacked the majority of those workdays before the actual start of instruction.
“It’s not the most effective use of our time,” says Guttman, who says no matter how much time teachers have to prepare for students, invariably, they’ll need to re-tool by October – only there will be no planning time for that.
The work “will still get done, because I have yet to meet a teacher who isn’t going to do what it takes to get their jobs done,” claims Guttman. “We’ll just be doing it at night and on the weekends and during holidays.”
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