Little by little reports will come out showing that parents are fleeing school districts. Whether it is the abusive mask mandate, the teaching of bigotry or the use of the classroom preparing students to attend the Hugh Heffner School of Sex, parents have said ENOUGH.
“Elementary class sizes are larger than what the Santa Barbara Unified School District initially promised before the start of the school year because the administration is having a difficult time hiring teachers.
During the first week of school, teachers told Noozhawk that their class sizes are larger than expected. There were reports of kindergarten classes with as many 22 students and fifth-grade classes with 29. The teachers said the district also is not enforcing social distancing in the classrooms.
Even with larger class sizes—not enough to make up for schools closed for the past 18 months, there are not enough teachers. After all, if you are a professional educator, why would you want to through away education for government mandated indoctrination—you might as well fill taco shells?
Santa Barbara District’s Elementary Class Sizes Larger Than Expected Amid Teacher Shortage
Superintendent Hilda Maldonado says it has been a struggle to make needed hires; teachers express concern about a lack of social distancing in rooms
By Joshua Molina, Noozhawk, 8/20/21
Elementary class sizes are larger than what the Santa Barbara Unified School District initially promised before the start of the school year because the administration is having a difficult time hiring teachers.
During the first week of school, teachers told Noozhawk that their class sizes are larger than expected. There were reports of kindergarten classes with as many 22 students and fifth-grade classes with 29. The teachers said the district also is not enforcing social distancing in the classrooms.
Several teachers from multiple campuses spoke with Noozhawk on the condition of anonymity, concerned about retaliation from administrators at the district headquarters. In some cases, teachers said, classrooms sit empty while they have well more than 20 students in a classroom.
“I am back to pre-pandemic levels,” one teacher said. “I thought the reason we wanted to go back to 20-to-1 was to make up for severe learning loss.”
The district promised smaller class sizes to start the year to focus on learning loss that reportedly occurred when schools shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. Last fall, the district offered a remote virtual learning option for families who did not want to risk catching COVID-19, but scrapped that option this year for two other options: in-person classes or independent study.
Superintendent Hilda Maldonado said the district needs to hire at least four teachers for transitional kindergarten through sixth grade, but that it has struggled to hire them. The need to hire four teachers comes as district enrollment has dropped overall by about 300 students, she said.
“There’s a hiring shortage,” Maldonado said. “We didn’t have the teachers to do 20-to-1. What I didn’t want to do was hire a substitute teacher to start a school year.”
Some teachers have suggested that the district is only wanting to hire bilingual certified teachers at this time, or that more financial resources have been spent on administrative positions to oversee programs rather than on teacher positions in the classrooms.
“Our goal is to hire qualified teachers in every classroom this school year,” Maldonado said.
She said the district set out to hire 20 additional teachers in March, but that a combination of resignations and retirements have made it difficult to hire the right number of teachers. In addition, she said that the district values the number of students who are in the classroom after 10 days, not day one, because there is a natural settling that will occur.
The district declined to show Noozhawk a census of class sizes on day one, but said anecdotally that some classrooms for transitional kindergarten through sixth grade may have had 25 students, while others had 17.
Board president Kate Ford said there are many reasons for the hiring shortage.
