Fund Education - Start With Teachers

Very Disappointing

Middlesex County Board of Supervisors blew it! They had the chance to bring Middlesex teacher’s salaries up to the Commonwealth’s median and at the same time avoid Middlesex being the lowest paying school district in the area, but failed. They did not vote the 4% salary/benefit package increase requested by the School Board and the School Administration. For your information, Mathews County is raising teacher remuneration by 7%.

So, Middlesex education funding takes the fall for a lack of get-r-done backbone. The Board action fails to address the reality of our county’s education needs because it will further complicate our school system’s ability to reward teachers for good work done, to retain qualified teachers, to compete for new teachers and of course the bottom line to prepare our kids for their best future. The unanswered question is, how will an inadequate pay package do all that is needed? The Board of Supervisors did not answer the question. Perhaps they ignored it.

New research by García and Weiss of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) indicates…

“The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought. When indicators of teacher quality (certification, relevant training, experience, etc.) are taken into account, the shortage is even more acute than currently estimated, with high-poverty schools suffering the most from the shortage of credentialed teachers.”

García and Weiss go on to explain why the teacher shortage matters:

“A shortage of teachers harms students, teachers, and the public education system as a whole. Lack of sufficient, qualified teachers and staff instability threaten students’ ability to learn and reduce teachers’ effectiveness, and high teacher turnover consumes economic resources that could be better deployed elsewhere. The teacher shortage makes it more difficult to build a solid reputation for teaching and to professionalize it, which further contributes to perpetuating the shortage. In addition, the fact that the shortage is distributed so unevenly among students of different socioeconomic backgrounds challenges the U.S. education system’s goal of providing a sound education equitably to all children.”

Hey Middlesex County Supervisors who voted not to accept the school budget as proposed by the professionals, this is not good stewardship of our county.