Cutting The Fat at MPS Central Office?
The jobs being eliminated are already of those working in classrooms.
Milwaukee Public Schools administration building. Charles Edward Miller (CC-BY-SA)
The headlines for the last few weeks have read: “MPS shrinking office staff,” “Prioritizing our children: MPS Supt. addresses central office,” “New MPS Superintendent Cutting Central Office Jobs,” among others as Milwaukee Public Schools’ new Superintendent Brenda Cassellius announced moves to reduce positions at “central office” and have teachers reapply for their jobs in an effort to fill job vacancies in schools throughout the district.
The confusion comes from the idea that teachers in the Office of Academics are “central office” employees who sit in their offices on Vliet Street and are not in contact with students, families or school-based staff. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let’s look at just a sampling of the teacher titles that will be affected by this decision:
- Autism Program Support Teacher
- Early Childhood Teacher (K3 Grant Gordon)
- Early Childhood Itinerant Teacher
- ESL Teacher
- First Nations Teacher
- Home and Hospital Teacher
- Itinerant Teacher of the Visually Impaired
Let’s be clear, if these teachers lose their jobs there will be gaping holes in the instruction for some of the most needy students throughout the district, not a cut of some overpaid bureaucrat pushing paper.
Another point of confusion is that these teachers will be seamlessly moved into classroom vacancies. This ignores the highly specialized training of these teachers. A teacher of the visually impaired or a home and hospital teacher does not necessarily have the training to teach and lead in a K4 classroom.
Like we have seen at the national level, it is easy to blanketly label an entire class of workers as inefficient or redundant, but when we look a little deeper at the actual work that these public sector workers do, the truth is far different then the meme; and I fear we may see the same recall of workers in MPS as we have at the federal government when we realize the essential functions these teachers serve.
I, along with dozens of teachers and community members have personally conveyed these concerns to Dr. Cassellius and hope that she will reconsider cutting jobs that serve some of our most vulnerable students and families.
Christopher Fons is the newly elected District 5 representative on the Milwaukee Board of School Directors. He is a retired MPS teacher and parent of two current MPS students.
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