Chatham Education Assoc. Opposes Earlier Start To School Year

The following letter to the editor comes from Betsy Yates Long and Laura Noonan, co-presidents of the Chatham Education Association.

The School District of the Chathams's Board of Education meeting takes place at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the high school auditorium. Watch the meeting live on YouTube.

We invite the members of the Chatham community to tune into the early February Board of Education meeting, where we will have several representatives of the Chatham Education Association speaking about the calendar and the impact that moving the start date of schools to mid-August plays in many staff members’ lives. Due to the weather, we have chosen a few representatives to speak on behalf of the Association.

As school districts around us have had Covid-related conflict between staff and administration, Chatham staff have shown up to school on a regular basis. Our dedication to the Chatham community and our profession has been amazing. Chatham School Staff deserve recognition for not only consistently coming to school but meeting the challenges of this year head-on, still delivering instructional excellence. Teachers and staff are putting an incredible amount of effort and dedication into each day’s discussion, and all of us continue to fight to keep our heads above water: teachers, child study team, guidance, custodial staff, secretaries, administrators.

In response to the 2021-2022 calendar with an 8/23 start date, we created an impact survey to put into data-driven conversation the impact to our over 400 members. On Tuesday, 1/26, we sent the following points with further discussion and a summary of the impact to Dr. LaSusa and Ms. Weber to represent opinions on behalf of the membership:

• Starting early impacts many of our members from a financial perspective; for our almost 280 members who answered the survey, over $200,000 of impact was given thanks to loss of summer employment and child care thanks to an early start.
• Starting the school year in August is not compatible with the pension system, which disallows staff from being paid before September 15th, making staff work for a full month without pay.
• Fewer weeks in summer means burden on our secretarial, custodial, and maintainer staff to complete summer break work and prepare our buildings over a shortened amount of time.

While the 2021-2022 calendar has been amended and accounts for these things, and we are incredibly thankful for the consideration of our points, these issues will still present if Chatham schools start in mid-August in future years. We want to invite the community to understand the staff’s position as outlined above and with anecdotal evidence from each of our grade bands. The discussion and vote on the 2022-2023 calendar will be coming in the next two months and the points above will still be as important to that conversation. While it is in the jurisdiction of the Board and Superintendent to change the calendar as they see fit, we still need to be at the table of the discussions.

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