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1) Too many constituents -- the district has to deal with crumbling inner city schools and building new ones in the ever growing burbs. Inner city folks play the race card when a new suburban school is built without a significant upgrade for urban schools (most or which are not at capacity).
2) Central staff is huge and grossly overpaid. Staffers continually dream up stuff for teachers to do, so they can justify they cream puff jobs. Teachers get "help" from all kinds of "specialists" and end up having to cater to them, rather than to their students.
The problems of CMS are so simply to fix, all it takes is honesty and integrity...uhmm maybe not so simple after all.
Good Luck...I hope you make a better decision than going to CMS. Look, NC has 100 counties. Lots of places need and cherish new teachers, forget Charlotte.
Thanks for all your input so far!
Can you name some "good" public and charter schools?
As far as Charter schools...
Lake Norman Charter (traditional and strong academically)
Lincoln Charter (traditional and average academically)
Community School of Davidson (earthy)
Queens Grant
KIPP (geared toward inner city kids, Nationwide type of program)
Sugar Creek Charter (low income base, produces good test scores)
Mountain Island Charter (just opened...adding a grade per year, earthy-kind of)
There are more and also a TON of private schools (Independent, Catholic, Quaker, Episc., Christian, etc.)
Public: Union County I think are considered good. Within CMS the magnets are fairly good and of course there are still some good stadard neighborhood schools, mainly south of the city.
I don't work in CMS, but do work in another county.
First of all, as many have said, now is NOT a good time to try to get a teaching position in NC. We have seen budget cuts for 3 years straight, and have been on a pay freeze since the 2008-2009 school year. Insurance rates keep going up, so we are actually making less each year. In my county, we have not received any money to spend in the classroom for the last 2 school years, either. Anything I need has to be supplied out of my own pocket, or I can beg parents to supply it. My school does have a supply closet with things like glue, construction paper, crayons, and tape. That is about it. Our textbook fund was eliminated and we have not adopted any textbooks in the last 2 years, either. (Our science book is 12 years old- ridiculous!)
I teach in a fairly small school (400-450 students), and in 4 years, we have lost 2 teaching positions and 5 teacher assistant positions. They are projecting us to lose 2 more teachers and 6 more assistants after this year. This would put us down to THREE teacher assistants for the entire school. (I am from Michigan and we never had assistants there, but we had regular planning- which we do not down here).
I teach 5th grade, and I have had 23, 24, 25, and 28 students in my 4 years teaching here. There is a state cap of 24 for K-3, but there is no cap on 4-12.
There are a lot of local teachers without positions, so I imagine it would be pretty hard to get a job from out of state. The last 2 people we hired both had relatives working in the county office. There simply are not many open positions out there to apply for. In 2007, when I decided to relocate, there were tons of positions. I send out about 150 resume packets to schools with open positions in 5 counties. Literally- almost every single school had at least 1 opening. I was offered a job on the spot, and my phone rang like crazy during the month of August. This summer, I saw about 6 elementary positions posted in my county. There were about 50 or so in 2007.
As for contracts, they are pretty much a joke down here. All you get is a piece of paper stating you will have a position as long as there are enough students enrolled. There are no working hours, pay negotiations, etc... We can be held as long as our principal wants to hold us on any given day. Snow make up days can happen on Saturdays with only a days notice if it is necessary.
Some things to know about teaching elementary in NC- I interviewed at about 6 schools before I accepted my position in 4 different counties, and it was all the same.
- you have lunch duty- every day. I eat in the cafeteria with my kids every single day. One year, we had duty free lunch once a week- this was before the budget crisis.
- you have recess duty- every day. Never, ever have I went a day without it.
- you have bus or car duty before and/or after school. At my school, the principal has worked hard at minimizing this- we have after school duty every other week.
-planning is not a daily thing. I have had it 3 times a week for the last 3 years. However, I get scheduled for a bunch of meetings, so I rarely get to actually do anything. My first year, I only had it twice a week.
*Two days a week, I am with my kids every second of the day. If I have to use the bathroom, I have to beg the teacher next door to listen to my kids so I can go. Not fun.
My post probably sounds negative. I do love my job- I love the people I work with and most of all- I love teaching. There are a lot of challenges here that I had to adjust to. I subbed and volunteered in Michigan schools and moved here because there were about 1000-1500 applicants per position in my area. Success was measured in the number of job interviews you received because 99.9% of jobs went to someone with relatives in the system. When I interviewed at the first school in NC, I was floored- and I left crying. I had never even HEARD of things like lunch duty!! Luckily, I adjusted quickly and do not mind these things. I love what I do enough to accept what I don't like (like lack of planning). The pay is awful- I have worked a part time job in addition to teaching since my 2nd year.
If you already have a teaching position in Massachusetts, I would not recommend coming here. With the economy, the job security is non-existent here. But, if you do not have a position, it wouldn't hurt trying to find a job here. I have a friend who is about 8 years older than I am (she actually had a job in Michigan) who quit her job and taught down here for 2 years and was laid off. She works at a grocery store right now. She had prior experience, but she was the low man on the totem-pole, so she is jobless this year. She came in 2008.
You can find information about NC here. (salary, curriculum, etc...)
Here, you must live a specified distance away from the school before transportation will be provided. Otherwise, you can walk or be driven. There may be exceptions due to unsafe walking conditions, but I can't think of any examples here where that's happened.
Buses are not 100% filled. If a route runs through a neighborhood and has two empty spots, then normally that route would terminate and the kids go to school. However, it may change to running a mile out of the way to get those two kids. There are other ways, too, by splitting neighborhoods between routes to get to the magic 100%, but its complicated to explain. After the enrollment dies down in the fall, many routes are changed to try to optimize filling the buses, but it is not always possible. With fewer drivers, the routes may start to loop over each other or students bus stops moved to try to reach the magic 100% capacity on each bus.
Yes, the kids have to get up very early to catch the first run. And, it is not uncommon to have them get home an hour after school lets out.
Wow. That stinks. You would think with all the crazy and silly spending that goes on, they would spend it on our kids.
Wow. That stinks. You would think with all the crazy and silly spending that goes on, they would spend it on our kids.
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask a child to walk half a mile to school, do you? To me it's even more unreasonable to spend the ungodly amount of money they spend on busing. We have two buses just for my neighborhood, which is a mile or less from the school. There are typically four or five children on them. What a waste!
Don't get me started on the kid who lives in my neighborhood here in Steele Creek and gets picked up by an empty bus to go to a magnet all the way on the other side of Charlotte...
I see I am not the only one that knows of this special bus ride just for one kid . This kid lives in steel creek and attends McClintock.Many people also dont know that because bus driving is not a 12 month job that many part time light duty summer jobs have been created to keep the full time checks coming.to the bus drivers.A big waste of money.They just find little things for them to do so they can put in days till the buses roll again. Things like washing buses, taping up torn seats and folding papers for the print shop...easy work for good pay at the taxpayers unknowing expense...
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask a child to walk half a mile to school, do you? To me it's even more unreasonable to spend the ungodly amount of money they spend on busing. We have two buses just for my neighborhood, which is a mile or less from the school. There are typically four or five children on them. What a waste!
Don't get me started on the kid who lives in my neighborhood here in Steele Creek and gets picked up by an empty bus to go to a magnet all the way on the other side of Charlotte...
My child turns five next week so she has not started school yet. We live right at one mile from the school she will attend.
Besides the fact that she would have to cross a very busy road to get to the school, I would not want my five year old child walking to school even if it was three blocks away.
I see I am not the only one that knows of this special bus ride just for one kid . This kid lives in steel creek and attends McClintock.Many people also dont know that because bus driving is not a 12 month job that many part time light duty summer jobs have been created to keep the full time checks coming.to the bus drivers.A big waste of money.They just find little things for them to do so they can put in days till the buses roll again. Things like washing buses, taping up torn seats and folding papers for the print shop...easy work for good pay at the taxpayers unknowing expense...
They did not do that where I came from. They were paid a salary and they had the option to have so much withheld from each check so they would still get at least a small check during the summer months. This applied to the cooks as well. I think they may have did the same for the teachers but I'm not sure on that one.
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask a child to walk half a mile to school, do you?
Unless the parents are in a position to walk the child to school every day (stay at home parent)- I think it is completely out of the question for an elementary school age child to walk to school. This may have been okay 10 or 20yrs ago, but there is too much weird stuff going on and I wouldn't dare let my six year old walk 4 houses down the road to his friend's house by himself.
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