Welcome to the Era of Getting By at School

It is only a few days before school is out. I am sitting in my fourth-grade classroom. I have stripped the walls of hundreds of hours of student work and teacher effort for another summer. I look around and realize that much more than just my classroom is being dismantled this year.

I am witnessing a giant step backward for the Irvine schools. I wonder if five or 10 years from now I will look back on this school year as the end of the Golden Age of Education, a time when my school was one of the best in the state and the nation.

At a staff meeting this morning, I received a piece of paper listing “Reductions to Level of State and Contractual Minimums.” Minimums.

The word screams at me. Minimums? Our staff do the minimum? I don’t think so! I read the line items over and over trying to comprehend what is ahead for me, for my students, for my own children still in school. I read words like “eliminate,” “defer,” “reduce,” “run faster.”

There will be less music, less art, less science. Half a librarian per elementary school. Fewer support services for students with limited English, for speech, counseling, and disciplinary situations. Less money for paper and pencils. No computer lab technicians. Probably a reduced teaching day, leaving me less time to implement new ideas and to try making up for the losses created by the budget cuts.

I pick up one of the surveys sent to parents asking for their input about where to make cuts in programs.

A comment catches my eye. Cut out psychologists and guidance technicians, one parent suggests. Her children never had to use these services. I wonder about the other children, the ones who have shared classroom space with these two lucky ones. Won’t their unmet needs and those of many other students impact everyone?

Welcome to the Era of Just Getting By. I wonder how long my colleagues will be able to juggle all the challenges caused by “Reductions to Level of State and Contractual Minimums.”

How long will it be before voters realize that teachers will simply not be able to do business as usual? What will I say to parents at Back to School Night next fall about how I plan to soften the effects of these cuts? How far will parents themselves be willing to go to take up the slack? How will it feel to look back on the 1992-93 school year and realize that my students did not have the same opportunities that classes before them had?

LINDA DUFFY WILSON, Irvine