"My name is Beth Smith, I live in Freeport, where I also teach sixth grade Dual Language, a town similar in many ways to where I grew up out in Riverhead. I have been teaching in the district for 23 years and it has always been a very diverse population of students, and in the last half of that time, there has been a higher percentage of Hispanic population, with the Black population being the next highest population, with very few white or Asian people in the community.
One of the things that I noticed in this district versus others is that there is a very large need for inclusion and special education services, but not enough resources to give to all the students that need it. I have been told that there is no more room for kids to go to inclusion or self-contained classrooms, and they often remain in a classroom with some support, but less than they need. The amount of students who need social-emotional support is off the charts, and there is a constant push to keep up with all of that. Everywhere there is a lot of that in this day and age. Because of social workers, administrators, and psychologists being stretched so thin trying to meet those social-emotional needs and discipline demands, there are a lot of discipline issues that go brushed under the rug because they are stretched so thin. I had an instance with a student in the past couple months in the bus circle. I had my arm up to let the kids know to stand back while the buses were pulling in, and a kid walked into my arm, so I told him to walk around and he replied 'Get off me bitch.' In another district, another kid would never be able to get away with saying that to a teacher and receiving no consequences, but here, nothing happened. They let things like that go in this district because they have so many other issues to worry about, whereas in another school district they have similar issues as, for example, a student mouthing off to a teacher, but they do not have some of these other demands to meet.
Especially in the department that I work in, being Dual Language, I have many students whose first language is Spanish. I just had a girl get transferred into my class who just came to this country for the first time. There are classes full of students, multiple in our building, that are new to the country in the last year or two, though I do not teach them personally. Some of them come with a past of steady education, but there is a whole class in our school of students who have had no, or very broken, formal education before fifth and sixth grade in our school. They have to learn to read in their native language, and also later in English, and they make huge strides, but in the country they came from they did not have the opportunity for education. The district is doing a decent job of meeting needs for these students. The fact that they have a specific class for students needing to catch up is great, but there definitely is a lot of room for improvement. Classes like these are not available at every grade-level, or in every school, but improvements are definitely being made and the recognition for the need for this is improving.
We are a lower socioeconomic district, which means there are less people paying taxes for schools, so therefore they know that many people who are here cannot afford a higher tax bracket, so they try to keep the tax levy low. That means that there is less tax money for the schools, but the other side of that is that our district gets a lot of money through grants. Those are great, but the issue with grants is that the money from those can only be allotted for the specific thing that the grant was for. For example, we must have gotten a specific grant for flexible seating in classrooms, because we have to get rid of perfectly good, functional desks, because we got this grant money. There are plenty of other things that do need some attention and money to improve, but the grant was expressly for that, so that is all we can use it for.
As my children reached school-age, I sat with a mentor of mine who was a principal at the elementary school where I was considering sending them. I was concerned about going through this district, knowing there were some issues, but I have always been a proponent for public school education, but I was nervous. So I sat with her, and truly trusted her insight, and made the decision to keep my girls in the district. A big part of it was because we wanted them to grow up in a diverse community. We were really happy with their elementary education, but it becomes more of a fend-for-yourself scenario once you get to middle school and high school age. You have to kind of be on the Honors track to get a real education. So, you know, depending on the day, sometimes I am happy we kept my kids in the schools, sometimes I am not. I am happy and proud that I have children who can view the world through an open-minded, accepting lens. I do not question whether they would have been non-judgmental, but I think it is different to be raised outside of a community like Freeport, versus inside it and seeing people who look different from you as the same as you in so many ways that matter. You learned that you do not have to come from the same background or ethnicity to have the same goals or aspirations."
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