The recent news that an overwhelming majority of Ashe County educators are happy with their work environment is a validation of the steady leadership offered by our schools’ administrators and the Board of Education.
The road to happiness for our teachers has been marked with big potholes over the last five years: no salary increases, attempts to eliminate tenure, continuing attempts to eliminate teacher assistants in kindergarten through third grade, increases in classroom sizes, state-mandated changes in testing and providing less dollars for public education by offering tax dollars to private charter schools.
Through it all, our Board of Education and the school’s administrators have worked tirelessly to create a classroom environment that recognizes teachers’ efforts and have gone on record with their concerns, and letting their teachers know, that the mandates from Raleigh could have an impact on classroom morale.
To put it another way, our teachers know, our Board of Education’s “got their back.”
And it’s working. A whopping 93 percent of teachers in Ashe County believe their school is a good place to work and learn, which is eight percentage points higher than the state average.
Education in North Carolina has always been tossed about like a political football. For years, classroom size was the hot button issue in educational politics. Today, it’s teacher pay and charter schools.
And while the game continues in Raleigh, in Ashe County, our teachers, with the solid support of our Board of Education and administrators, tune out the politics and focus on what’s most important – providing the best environment for our children to learn.
