Schools to be closed Tuesday

One day, two closures.

Jay Schools announced Tuesday afternoon that schools will be closed Nov. 19 because of the vast number of teachers who have requested a personal day to support Indiana State Teachers Association’s Red for Ed Action Day. It will be an e-learning day for local students.

The announcement came on the same day that Jay Schools closed and implemented its first e-learning day because about 3 inches of snow that fell Monday evening.

“Really, there’s no choice. At some point when you don’t have enough subs to cover, you can’t have school,” said Jay Schools superintendent Jeremy Gulley. “There’s just not enough teachers in the school that day to have school. So it’s really a necessity.”

Requests to take Nov. 19 off as a personal day have grown over the course of the last week. Noticing the trend, Gulley asked any additional teachers to make such requests by Tuesday afternoon so the corporation could plan accordingly.

They did.

As of 3 p.m. Tuesday, 56 teachers — about 26 percent of the total employed by Jay Schools — had turned in forms requesting Nov. 19 as a personal day. One school had more than 75 percent of its teachers planning to be off work, with most of the others in the corporation between 18 and 35 percent.

Gulley said the corporation’s average need for substitute teachers is 12 per day. With more than four times that many already planned to be absent, he said he felt an e-learning day made more sense that trying to cover classrooms with substitutes and other corporation employees.

“My thought process was, if we think this is going to happen, let’s give people time to plan,” said Gulley.

Because of the amount of teachers who will be unavailable Nov. 19, students will be given an extra day — six instead of the usual five — to complete e-learning assignments.

Jay Classroom Teachers Association is supportive of ISTA’s Red for Ed initiative and the upcoming event, though union leadership did not expect the groundswell of support.

As of a meeting a few weeks ago, plans called for the five JCTA officers to attend the Red for Ed Action Day at the Indiana Statehouse. That changed as more and more corporations — the number is now more than 100, including those in New Castle, Huntington, Anderson and Hagerstown — announced they would either be canceling classes or having e-learning days on Nov. 19 and local teachers began requesting the day off.

“The whole thing is gaining a lot of momentum,” said JCTA president Paul Szymczak. “It’s taking off.”

“I think this is a pretty clear indication that the system’s broken at the state level,” he added. “It indicates there are some serious flaws in the system as it’s currently set up. I think this is an opportunity for everyone to highlight that and express the desire for some changes and some fixes.”

ISTA has organized the Action Day demonstration set for Nov. 19 — Organization Day for the state legislature — in an effort push the state legislature to make changes to education policy. More than 100 of the state’s 287 school districts have announced cancelations or e-learning days.

Demonstrators are asked to arrive on the south lawn at the statehouse beginning at 8:30 a.m. ISTA president Keith Gambill will speak at 10:30 a.m., with a march to follow.

Plans call for entering the statehouse at 12:30 p.m., with educators sharing stories about challenges within the system at 1 p.m. Closing announcements are slated for 2 p.m.

ISTA has laid out three priorities as part of its Red for Ed initiative:

•Improvement of teacher compensation via the state’s budget surplus

•Holding schools and teachers harmless from the results of last year’s new ILEARN test

•Repealing a requirement to earn 15 “professional growth points” in order to renew teaching licenses.

“It’s about teachers. It’s about administrators. It’s about students. It’s about public education,” said Szymczak. “We all have seen the data that Indiana is not comparing favorably with the rest of the country in terms of our educational outcomes. I think this is a response to that.”

He specifically focused on the state’s school funding system, referring to it as “broken,” and noting that it makes finding and retaining teachers and support staff difficult. He also noted the challenges involved with frequently changing standardized tests.

“It’s maddening,” he said in reference to ILEARN and its predecessor ISTEP. “It’s a nightmare every year.”

Jay Schools is supportive of the teachers’ to “exercise the rights shared by all Americans to express themselves, peaceably assemble, and petition their government,” Gulley said. He added that recent education policies handed down from the state have been “domineering.”

“I think that the teachers have not necessarily been heard over the last decade,” he said. “I haven’t seen much of their point of view effecting policy.”

The demonstration set for Indianapolis next week comes on the heels of teacher uprisings in other states of the course of the last couple of years.

Statewide strikes or walkouts ranging from a single day to several weeks have occurred in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia since the beginning of 2018.

The most significant change came in Arizona, where teachers received a 20-percent raise that totaled $644 million. Virginia and West Virginia teachers received 5-percent raises, while Oklahoma teacher salaries were increased by about $6,000 apiece.