We are in the midst of hiring math teachers for next year at both high schools. Today I traveled across town to watch a student teacher do a demo lesson in Algebra 1, and she was fairly good. Friday I will do it again. There at two math openings right now, with the possibility of three more at the two middle schools. We certainly do not want a repeat of last year where we basically never filled one of five math openings, and have been scrambling with substitutes all year. That was quite a fiasco.

Both the town where I live and the town where I work voted down their school budgets yesterday. I just do not understand the mentality of most voters. This county has one of the five highest average-incomes in the country, and probably the highest standard of living in the entire world, and yet the voters care so little about education that they vote down budgets repeatedly, not caring how it impacts on their children’s education at all. With teachers in such areas as mathematics, hard sciences, and language being so hard to find, do the taxpayers really believe that the few available teachers in those areas will jump at the chance to come to a district with an obvious anti-education bias? The Board of Education tried very hard to make all district teachers pay even more towards their insurance coverage during the last round of negotiations. If they succeed in doing so next time, they can kiss all new math and hard science teachers good-bye. Those teachers can make so much more money in private industry, why should they work for considerably-less money teaching in a district which squeezes them financially even more?