Teachers Do Not Deserve Criticism

* So the Parent Advisory Committee to the Oxnard school board thinks district teachers who live outside of Oxnard have “no sense of commitment” to the children they teach? Committee co-chairperson Susan Lopez should resign at once. Let’s hear some applause for the four board members who had the sense to agree that the committee’s remarks were out of line.

My wife is teacher of the year at Cesar Chavez School. We live in Thousand Oaks. She spends more hours a week with her kindergarten children than some of their parents do. She works late and weekends preparing for her primary teaching responsibilities. She has visited families in their homes. She has telephone contact with parents. At the last open house only 12 out of 30 children had parents who showed up, and that was better than usual. Perhaps the committee should look in a different direction to find the lack of commitment to the children.

There may indeed be some teachers (and administrators) who could put out more effort. But the committee’s comments are an unnecessary and unfortunate canard. Indeed, the last time (and it may well be the last time) I volunteered to assist at a Saturday school activity at Chavez School, the teachers who were there, on their own time, represented residences all over the county. As if that has anything to do with an attitude of commitment!

Such pernicious balderdash is enough to make one lose his religion.

Rev. Dr. Wilbur Skeels

Thousand Oaks

* Since when did geography become an assessment tool of a teacher’s level of commitment to her students? Some of the most dedicated teachers I know live almost an hour away from the school. By the same token, if you really wanted to, I am sure you could find a less committed teacher living a stone’s throw away from some campus. But why would you want to work at making this kind of negative (if not ridiculous) correlation?

There are already plenty of reasons people choose to judge each other: skin color, language preference, religious beliefs and income level, to name a few. Is this an attempt to add geography to the list? I guess someday it will not be enough to be politically correct--one will have to be geographically correct as well.

I live in Ventura and teach in the Colonia area of Oxnard. As a bilingual teacher I am sure I could find a position closer to my home. But, and I think I speak for other commuting teachers when I say this, I work in Oxnard because those are the children and parents and colleagues with whom I want to work. This is where I choose to be.

Aren’t we all in this together--working for a quality education for the children of Oxnard? To attack one’s own partners in education seems to be a little like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Eddi Christensen

Ventura

Eddi Christensen teaches at Cesar Chavez School in Oxnard .