At a special meeting held remotely on June 17, 2024, Councilor Rothenberg presented a budget map for school funding to City Council members, Mayor Sciarra, and City Finance Director Nardi. Councilor Rothenberg invited two NPS teachers to present statements at the meeting. Joanne Morgan, Grade 1 teacher, read the following statement.
I appreciate the opportunity to talk about what the proposed budget cuts would look like from a classroom perspective. I know many other educators have spoken eloquently about this topic over the past many months.
I teach first grade at Bridge Street School. As mentioned at a previous city council meeting, one way to differentiate instruction at the elementary level is to run “centers” time in your classroom. I run both reading and math centers in my classroom every day, where students rotate between different activities over a period of 45 minutes to an hour for reading, and again for math. It is my understanding that many teachers at the elementary level in Northampton have some sort of centers rotation in their classrooms. That is the time of day when I can meet with students in a small group at my teacher table to provide them with targeted instruction.
While I am meeting with students at my teacher table, the other students are doing independent work or meeting with another educator for direct instruction. Although I am the teacher generally in charge of what is going on in my classroom during “centers” time, I am by no means the only educator responsible for students’ progress during those times of day. I want to be very clear about that: I work with a team of educators who support students in countless ways. I will start with our first-grade paraprofessionals:
In a first-grade classroom, a paraprofessional is invaluable. They help manage what is happening in the classroom throughout the day. When I am teaching a small group at my teacher table, they support the general running of the classroom, helping students stay on task, managing who is in the bathroom, getting Band-Aids, and those kinds of things.
But when they are consistently in the classroom, first-grade paraprofessionals also provide instruction to students. That might come in the form of having a student read a book or passage aloud and providing corrective feedback. It might mean playing a learning game with a small group of students to help them practice a particular skill. Having a paraprofessional in the classroom means two important things: first, I do not need to disrupt my teaching to handle management issues that inevitably come up; and, second, students get a lot more out of their work when there is an educator present who holds them accountable for doing their work and provides them with instruction and feedback with whatever they are working on at the same time.
Math and reading interventionists provide much-needed academic support to students who are struggling to learn foundational skills. That is in addition to the instruction I provide to students in my classroom. For many students who are achieving below or well below grade level in math or reading, it is just not possible for the classroom teacher to provide them with enough instruction to make adequate progress, no matter how well the classroom is managed.
In addition, because the special education referral and identification process can take so long in the early grades, these interventionists provide support to students who need more intensive special education support and who are waiting for those services to begin.
I can tell you that with our current staffing levels, there continue to be students who are not adequately served, because there are not enough interventionists at this time. I sat in multiple data team meetings this year where faculty had to debate which of the students who clearly needed additional support based on assessment data would actually receive that support and which students would not receive it because there were not enough slots in the interventionist teaching schedules to meet the current level of need.
I will say again, no matter how organized a teacher is, it is not possible for only the classroom teacher to support all students in making adequate progress in reading and math. I cannot imagine how I would be thinking about reaching all students in my classroom if I was also in a school that was dealing with large class sizes due to classroom teacher cuts.
Everything that gets done in an elementary classroom in Northampton is made possible by the support of the tiered support specialists. These faculty members are essential to the daily running of our schools. They support countless students in navigating difficult social situations and provide instructional support to students in classrooms. Their support in and out of the classroom helps students learn new skills, manage important social connections in their lives, and come to class ready to learn.
I can think of many dozens of times over the last six years in Northampton when support specialists stepped in to support a student in a way that helped both that student as well as the rest of the students in my class. Tiered support specialists help de-escalate students who have become particularly dysregulated, which helps teaching continue in the classroom while that student gets a needed break and adult support. Without their support multiple times a week, I would have students in my class who are not ready to learn, because their thoughts are stuck on something. It is often a small but significant issue that requires them to take a break from the classroom with a skilled educator.
If one person were trying to do the two jobs of the tiered support specialists at Bridge Street School next year, I imagine three things would happen: first, she would not be able to support the social, emotional, and behavioral needs of the students across the seven grades (pre-K through five), leading to more students experiencing larger social difficulties; second, these individual students whose needs weren’t being met would contribute to a greater level of unease and chaos in the building, disrupting the learning for even more students; finally, she herself would experience a level of burnout that would be untenable.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also address the reduction of the administrative assistant positions at the elementary level. A primary responsibility we have as educators is to maintain the safety of our students. Our administrative assistants, among their many other responsibilities, maintain our attendance records and act as gatekeepers in terms of who comes into the building. If you don’t spend your day working in a public school building, you might not know what it’s like to go through your day with an underlying feeling of unease about the violence that might walk through your door, as we all too often hear about in the news.
As with our tiered support specialists, I don’t even know all the things administrative assistants do behind the scenes. What I do know is that they help our schools run smoothly, and when they are not there, it is sometimes the principal who takes on their responsibilities because there is no one else available. That doesn’t seem like a viable way to run a school.
Although I’ve spoken specifically about how the effects will impact an elementary classroom at my school, I think I can speak generally for educators across the district when I tell you that none of the proposed cuts make sense to us. The same scenarios I’ve described at Bridge Street School are replicated from preschool through grade 12. The staff positions that would be cut provide essential services. There are not other people in any building who can reasonably take on the slack for any other positions.