Fixing this requires both financial and cultural changes. We need to increase school funding, increase the number of educators and reduce class sizes.
I recently toured 10 schools — elementary, middle and high — whose students come from my North Anchorage legislative district. I met with principals in each school and observed classes. My observations:pandemic have strained the social skills of students. One middle school principal told me that half of the “issues” at the school arose from social media.
There are brutal economic pressures on the families of students at schools in Anchorage’s low-income areas. One principal told me that while she used to expect two parents to have three jobs among them, she now expects each working parent to have three jobs. Families are facing eviction more often. Staff shortages are a chronic headache for most schools I visited. One principal told me that an absence of alternatives forced him to teach Spanish for the first two weeks of the school year when he had never taught it before. It has always been true that public servants are paid less than what they would receive in the private sector, but it has gotten out of hand. Experienced teachers and administrators are increasingly leaving for higher-paying jobs.
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