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Emily Albee has taught Social Research in RSU 22 for 12 years. She is the 2022 Penobscot County Instructor of the Yr and a member of the Maine Training Affiliation.
Serving and surviving as a public college instructor in Maine for 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic created innumerable challenges to beat and issues to unravel. Society was drastically reminded of the important roles colleges and educators play offering college students equitable entry to educational and emotional assist, meals, web, and total life stability. Regardless of the nationwide divisiveness about training, vitriol spewed at college board conferences, and requires curriculum censorship, educators continued to rise above the challenges and maintain training as their primary precedence for college kids.
Moreover, our legislative and govt management in Maine rose above the noise and distractions to safe three important coverage victories for public training in Maine. There could also be points that also divide legislators however traditionally, we’ve got by no means seen politicians in Augusta come collectively like this to assist our public colleges particularly throughout an especially tumultuous interval. It’s time to spotlight and have fun these insurance policies that required bipartisan compromise, management, and the sensible dedication to training.
After a 17-year effort, the state lastly achieved its 55 p.c state funding objective for colleges for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 college years. Correctly funded colleges permit for the event and entire implementation of studying for our twenty-first century learners. This monetary funding is a giant image funding for the infrastructure and improvement of Maine to coach the following era of modern thinkers and drawback solvers. This permits colleges to lastly shift away from the imposed expectation on educators to, “do extra with much less.”
The 55 p.c state funding of colleges is way from excellent, and we all know we should do extra particularly for communities combating property tax will increase, reassessment, rising housing costs and common housing uncertainty. Voters of Maine established this goal by means of a statewide poll initiative in 2004 (and reaffirmed the objective by means of a poll referendum in 2016) and legislators lastly met it.
The lately enacted “$40K The First Day” is a law requiring all lecturers in Maine to make a minimal of no less than $40,000 their first yr of instructing. This coverage victory begins to handle the wage inequities throughout the state the place disparate instructing salaries have lengthy hindered communities from recruiting and retaining lecturers. This coverage additionally opens the door on the negotiation desk to make sure veteran educators proceed to be compensated appropriately with aggressive salaries as we face unprecedented numbers of educators leaving the classroom.
We all know that lecturers’ working circumstances are the scholars’ studying circumstances. The beautiful injustice of passionate and high quality lecturers selecting between staying within the classroom or switching to different professions to pay their payments and assist their households is starting to be addressed.
Our legislators achieved a large coverage victory for fairness in training by permitting all college students in Maine to receive free breakfast and lunch. College students who’re hungry can not study.
The defining components of what constitutes battle for households are ever-changing particularly in the course of the pandemic. For many years, the transferring goal of socioeconomic standing and earnings ranges because the figuring out issue for supporting college students in want created one other barrier to pupil success. Our legislators acknowledged numerous our college students wanted additional assist and so they offered entry to free meals for all college students and offered the funding essential to execute this system with out additional rising property taxes.
We owe our state legislators and Gov. Janet Mills gratitude and a spherical of applause for these accomplishments they achieved for our colleges. The journey is simply starting and it’s time to proceed the coverage work for our twenty-first century learners.
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