Detroit Teacher 'Sickouts' Close Schools Again

Putting kids first:

Nearly all of Detroit's public schools were closed Wednesday after teachers called in sick, en masse, to protest poor school conditions. The latest "sickout" comes a day after Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder's State of the State address, in which he did not directly address teachers' protests or school conditions.

Teacher absences forced about 88 of Detroit's public schools to close Wednesday,according to the Detroit Public Schools Facebook page. The extensive sickout was staged to coincide with President Obama's visit to Detroit on Wednesday, Detroit Federation of Teachers spokeswoman Ann Mitchell told The Associated Press.

"People couldn't miss the opportunity for us to say, 'This is what's happening and we really need help,' " she said. "We really need someone to help focus on the schools."

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who is scheduled to meet with Obama, has called teachers' complaints legitimate but wants them to return to school.

School district spokeswoman Michelle Zdrodowski says school closures aren't serving children. Wednesday's closures mean that "44,790 of the District's 46,325 students lost a critical day of instruction," she said according to the Detroit Free Press. "There were, however, nine district schools that stayed open today. We appreciate the teachers and staff at those schools for being in their classrooms and ensuring that their students are learning today."

The closures are the latest in a string of recent school closings caused by teacher sickouts. Last week, teacher absences resulted in three consecutive days of school closures.

 

Must be something in the water.

 

Damn you've been slow on this one. I've been waiting on it all week.

It is all the teachers' fault. They're focusing on the negative conditions and missing a golden opportunity to teach kids about urban farming!

 

So, spend a day cleaning the school.

They're short on money. There are ways of dealing with this:

Back in 2011, Newt Gingrich was running for president, and he proposed a radical idea to help schools cut costs: Fire the janitors and pay students to do the cleaning.

Needless to say, the idea to turn students into moonlighting janitors had about as much support as Gingrich's presidential campaign.

But ask Kim De Costa and she'll say there isn't anything radical about asking students to clean up after themselves. At her school, there are no janitors. Instead, students in grades 6-12 meet in teams once or twice a week to clean assigned areas.

De Costa is the executive director of the Armadillo Technical Institute. It's a public charter school in Phoenix, Ore., a few miles from the California border.

For 30 minutes after lunch, students sweep, mop, take out the trash and even clean the bathrooms — but responsibilities rotate so no one is stuck scrubbing toilets more than two or three times a year.

De Costa says it's easy to encourage students to respect their environment when they're the ones responsible for preserving it.

"We really wanted a school where the students took ownership and made it their own," says De Costa, who helped found ATI in 1999.

The school still has maintenance staff for the difficult or dangerous work. But for the most part, students at ATI handle the daily upkeep. And with a little help from peer pressure, the school stays clean.

Without Janitors, Students Are In Charge Of Keeping School Shipshape

 

..and kids should replace their own pipes in Flint, too!

 

Good for the teachers if this gets something done.

Maybe we could get one of the kids to be the new bus driver to save some money.

 

Call it immersive geography education.

 

Rats, roaches, mold – poor conditions leads to teacher sickout, closure of most Detroit schools


Classrooms are plagued by rats, roaches, mold, ceilings full of holes and unreliable heat. Teachers don’t have textbooks or other supplies they need to teach, they say, and they haven’t had a raise in 10 years.

“We felt it was time to take a stand. No more, enough is enough,” said Marietta Elliott, a special education teacher at Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy. “We need better working environments for our students to be educated in. We need supplies to be able to adequately educate them, and we want equitable pay.”

Ann Mitchell, administrator of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, said some teachers have 45 kids in a class, far over the national average, which ranges from 15 to 23 students per class, depending on grade level, according to federal data..

 

Clearly administration isn't interested in putting kids first.

 

`School infrastructure is a problem in many school divisions.

To do the needed repairs on a school you need more than 10-12 weeks, so where do these children go when the school year starts and the building is not open?

You also have the no tax mindset of not wanting to approve bonds for new schools. A new elem will cost between $35 and $50 million.

It not an easy solution.

 

Kids laying pipe in school gets teachers arrested. Poin!