But should I say anything?
As Livejournal is a dead form of social media (in North America anyway) I am often more comfortable posting things here than I am on other social media platforms. I'm still saying something publically, and due to the nature of the internet permanently, but I am saying it to a much smaller audience. I am particularly more comfortable writing here about topics that are sensitive or require greater tact. One of those has been bubbling up inside me for a while now.
If one reads anything about public education in Kansas these days one quickly realizes that that there is a great deal of contention in Kansas about education. Having lived that for two years I have some thoughts. But should I say anything? Is it safe to say anything? I am no longer in Kansas but I am still a teacher albeit an unemployed one. Could I endanger my employment prospects by writing about this? Could a potential employer search the internet for my writings? Absolutely. Could what I type be here harm my chances of being interviewed or hired? In principle of course it could. I'll take the risk. Some of what I have to say casts my former employer in a poor light. That is not my intent but it is unavoidable. By posting my thoughts here do I run the risk of burning whatever bridges I still have in Kansas? Yes and I know that.
However Livejournal is all but dead as a form of social media so I'll write what I want trusting that the number of people who read this probably number less than ten and certainly less than twenty. Unless I or they make an effort to draw attention to this post my thoughts will go unobserved and unremarkled upon. Mostly I am writing this for my own catharsis.
...
I taught high school in Kansas for two years. I taught for a publicly funded school district. After two years I broke my contract and returned home to Toronto, Canada. The two big questions are "Why did I go?" and "Why did I leave?".
Taking the job in Kansas was a mistake. Not just a short term two year mistake but a career impacting mistake. It still remains to be seen if my career will recover from it. I had been teaching in Ontario, in the Toronto region, since 2000. I began teaching for the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) in March of 2005. My role there was as a Long Term Occasional (LTO) teacher. I replaced teachers who were gone for extended periods of time. Sabbaticals, Maternity leaves, Extended illness, and in a few cases I did not replace any one. There was a gap in the hiring and no teacher was available to teach the classes I was asked to teach.
In the majority of these assignments I was the only teacher of record for the classes. I planned the lessons, set the exams, met the parents, recorded grades, and taught the students. Yes, I was paid through the Occasional teaching office but any outside observer would assume I was a full-contract teacher. Indeed one of my classes was so outraged that I was not coming back to their school the next year that they were prepared to march on the Board office in protest! I talked them down and they settled for starting a Facebook group instead. Even there though they stated that I was being fired rather than simply reaching the end of my contract.
Why did I do these LTO jobs? Didn't I want a full contract? I was asked that on many occasions. I did (and still do) want a full contract. I was assured by many within the teaching profession that these LTOs would earn me a full contract eventually. Key word there: eventually.
Seven years I did LTOs for the TDSB. Every year I was assured (though never in any official way) that "next year" I'd be able to get a full contract. Seven years I taught full-time but on a series of short term contracts. Every summer I was unemployed and at the end of each LTO position I had no idea where, when, or if I'd find another one. After seven years of this I was frustrated and angry.
In 2004 I had gone through the process of acquiring a Kansas teaching licence. Why Kansas? My family is from there. As I grew up I spent most of my summers in Kansas at the family farm. I have a very positive view of Kansas. And in 2004 it had been 14 months since my last LTO position had ended. Going "home" seemed like a good idea. But I secured an LTO in Toronto in 2005. I got married. We had a child. All in Toronto. Yet I was no closer to a full contract than I had been in 2004. So I kept looking at job postings in Kansas and applying to them. I never heard back from most of the schools I applied to and the one or two that I did hear from just said "thanks for applying but..." or some variation on that theme.
In October of 2012 I was in an LTO position for the TDSB that was expected to end after 8 weeks. I was called by a school in Kansas to interview for an ESL job with the Kansas City Kansas Public Schools (KCKPS). I explained that I was under contract in Toronto but only short-term. A Skype interivew was arranged instead. Contrary to all my expectations I was offered the job and it was a Full Contract position! The pay was a much lower than the pay in Toronto (approxamately 56% of the TDSB wage) but I was assured by friends and family that the cost of living was also lower. I accepted the job. (Within a month the Ontario provincial governement passed Bill 115 which included Regulation 274. If I had stayed in Ontario just one month longer that regulation would have set me on a path towards a full-contract job in Ontario. But I knew none of that in November of 2012)
I broke my LTO contract, broke my lease on the apartment my family lived in (thereby incurring a $3000 penalty), rented a truck, and moved my wife and two sons to Kansas. Where I made a series of extremely unplesant discoveries.
The salary I was offered is not what I was going to be paid. My salary was to be pro-rated as I had been hired mid year. So for the first 10 months I worked in Kansas I was paid half of what I had been offered.
I was not being credited with any teaching experience. I was being paid as if I had just graduated from university and had never set foot inside a classroom before. I protested that I had almost 12 years of full time teaching experience but was told "we don't recognize substitute work". All those LTOs I had done were considered nothing more than substitute teaching by the KCKPS.
The cost of living in Kansas is lower than the cost of living in Toronto, Canada... but not enough low to compensate for the drastically lower wage I was being paid. Add in the pro-rating that was being done to my salary and the situation was much more grim. My family was in the red almost every month we lived in Kansas. I was a professional, employed full-time, and my family had to visit a food bank on a regular basis because we could not afford groceries. A co-worker bought me groceries on at least one occasion. Our rent took almost all of my pay each month. Utilities and other fixed costs took the rest.
Health insurance is unaffordable and the ACA is a mirage. The Affordable Care Act does not apply if one's employer offers health insurance. It doesn't matter how expensive the employer-based insurance is. That it is offered is enough to make one ineligable for the ACA. One of the fixed costs I mentioned in the previous paragraph was health insurance. I was paying $750/month. Maybe that is high. Maybe that is not. On my salary it was extortionate. I've tried so far to avoid inflammatory language but on this I will make an exception.
Should I have known this before quitting a good, but insecure, job and moving my family halfway across the continent? Yes. I should have. But I didn't even know I should have known these things. My ignorance hurt me and it hurt my family.
Over time things did get better. We qualified for social assistance. It wasn't much but it helped. (So I was a professional, working full time, receiving social assistance, and still needing to visit a food bank on a regular basis, just in case you're keeping track) Because our older son has type 1 diabetes he qualifed for special assistance and state-provided health insurance. That covered some of his health needs but not all. It didn't lower the $750/month by even a penny though. That covered my wife and our second child. After ten months the KCKPS stopped pro-rating my salary and we were able to breathe a little bit financially. We could even pretend we were in the black by acting as if making maintainence payments on our debts counted. (I tried working overtime in the school's tutoring lab but discovered that doing so reduced the social assistance we received by enough that the increased hours resulted in a net decrease in our household income.) Our children were happy and healthy. My family was happy to have me in their local area. My sister moved to Kansas City as well and our children could all play together.
Could we have stayed? Perhaps. We could have toughed it out. Our financial situation was gradually improving. I could see that in 20 years we would be out of debt... assuming no emergencies occured. However both Jeny and were increasingly unhappy. Neither of us ever were diagnosed or sought treatment but both of us displayed several symptoms of depression. All of Jeny's family and the majority of her friends live in Toronto. There is a Filipino population in Kansas City but it is very small. She felt very isolated and very alone. I was not much better. My family lives there but these are people I'd seen only during the summers and at Christmas. I didn't really know them any better than Jeny did. I realized that inspite of my roots there it was a foreign country to me. Almost all of my friends are in the Toronto area. Jeny and I got involved in groups and activities but never really felt at home.
I had been hired as an ESL teacher but I realized I didn't like teaching ESL. In January of 2014 when schools begin looking for staff I spoke with my Principal and explained I'd like to move to teaching History, which is what I am really intrested in. She sympathized with my desire to teach a subject I like but said that the school didn't need any additional History teachers. Yet in August of 2014 when the next semester began there was a brand new history teacher on staff in addition to the ones from the year before.
As a teacher in Toronto I had a great deal of professional autonomy. In the KCKPS I had almost none. Professional Development days were largely exercises in telling the teachers things they already knew and had known for years. The KCKPS has an annual event called Commencement. Teachers are required to attend. It is held a day or two before classes begin August. It is essentially a pep rally for the school board. It goes on for hours, hypes things far beyond any sense, tells us absolutely nothing of substance, and is very expensive for the Board to put on. It is simultaneously aggravating and insulting. Teachers who skip it are reprimanded and may have their pay docked.
Health insurance was unaffordably expensive but the health care we received was fine. We never had any complaints about the care itself. However every month, every single month, Jeny would be on the phone with insurance company because they were refusing to pay for something that the policy clearly stated that they would pay for. Our son has type 1 diabetes. It is an incurable autoimmune disorder. He is going to incur health care costs every day of his life. Our policy had a $2500 individual deductable. In a normal year his diabetic costs would come to about $2400. So we were paying 100% of his diabetic care costs out of pocket.
My wife was lonely and depressed. I was professionally frustrated, lonely, and depressed. Both of us were homesick. Yet had I been paid a wage that would have provided more than a subsistance level standard of living we might have stayed. Maybe not. Being profoundly unhappy could have overruled financial security. Had I been paid according to my experience we would most likely have stayed.
The constant cuts to education by the Kansas state government force the school boards to pay the teachers as little as possible. I'm sure the schools would like to pay teachers enough to keep them. Other teachers I worked with spoke openly about wanting to leave. My cousin who is also a teacher in Kansas told me that most of the staff at his school check the job boards daily.
In October of 2014, after yet another phone call to the health insurance company, Jeny told me she wanted to move back to Toronto. I had just learned that our health insurance premiums would be going up by $50/month. My pay was not going up by $50/month.
So I quit a full-contract job, gave a letter of non-renewal of lease to our landlord, rented a truck, and moved my family back to Toronto. We are home and we are happier. Happy to be here. Happy to be close to our friends.
I don't have a job at all here. Regulation 274, which would have been a boon to me in 2012, is now the single biggest obstacle to my employment. Principals who would like to call me in for substitute work or LTOs are prohibited from doing so as a consequence of Regulation 274. We've been home for seven months and so far I've not even had an interview for teaching, much less a job. I did manage to get work teaching summer school because it operates under slightly different rules. However that has no bearing whatsoever on regular school year teaching.
Jeny does not have a job here either but she has to possibility of work. Both of us have taken classes to increase our qualifications and therefore employability.
If one reads anything about public education in Kansas these days one quickly realizes that that there is a great deal of contention in Kansas about education. Having lived that for two years I have some thoughts. But should I say anything? Is it safe to say anything? I am no longer in Kansas but I am still a teacher albeit an unemployed one. Could I endanger my employment prospects by writing about this? Could a potential employer search the internet for my writings? Absolutely. Could what I type be here harm my chances of being interviewed or hired? In principle of course it could. I'll take the risk. Some of what I have to say casts my former employer in a poor light. That is not my intent but it is unavoidable. By posting my thoughts here do I run the risk of burning whatever bridges I still have in Kansas? Yes and I know that.
However Livejournal is all but dead as a form of social media so I'll write what I want trusting that the number of people who read this probably number less than ten and certainly less than twenty. Unless I or they make an effort to draw attention to this post my thoughts will go unobserved and unremarkled upon. Mostly I am writing this for my own catharsis.
...
I taught high school in Kansas for two years. I taught for a publicly funded school district. After two years I broke my contract and returned home to Toronto, Canada. The two big questions are "Why did I go?" and "Why did I leave?".
Taking the job in Kansas was a mistake. Not just a short term two year mistake but a career impacting mistake. It still remains to be seen if my career will recover from it. I had been teaching in Ontario, in the Toronto region, since 2000. I began teaching for the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) in March of 2005. My role there was as a Long Term Occasional (LTO) teacher. I replaced teachers who were gone for extended periods of time. Sabbaticals, Maternity leaves, Extended illness, and in a few cases I did not replace any one. There was a gap in the hiring and no teacher was available to teach the classes I was asked to teach.
In the majority of these assignments I was the only teacher of record for the classes. I planned the lessons, set the exams, met the parents, recorded grades, and taught the students. Yes, I was paid through the Occasional teaching office but any outside observer would assume I was a full-contract teacher. Indeed one of my classes was so outraged that I was not coming back to their school the next year that they were prepared to march on the Board office in protest! I talked them down and they settled for starting a Facebook group instead. Even there though they stated that I was being fired rather than simply reaching the end of my contract.
Why did I do these LTO jobs? Didn't I want a full contract? I was asked that on many occasions. I did (and still do) want a full contract. I was assured by many within the teaching profession that these LTOs would earn me a full contract eventually. Key word there: eventually.
Seven years I did LTOs for the TDSB. Every year I was assured (though never in any official way) that "next year" I'd be able to get a full contract. Seven years I taught full-time but on a series of short term contracts. Every summer I was unemployed and at the end of each LTO position I had no idea where, when, or if I'd find another one. After seven years of this I was frustrated and angry.
In 2004 I had gone through the process of acquiring a Kansas teaching licence. Why Kansas? My family is from there. As I grew up I spent most of my summers in Kansas at the family farm. I have a very positive view of Kansas. And in 2004 it had been 14 months since my last LTO position had ended. Going "home" seemed like a good idea. But I secured an LTO in Toronto in 2005. I got married. We had a child. All in Toronto. Yet I was no closer to a full contract than I had been in 2004. So I kept looking at job postings in Kansas and applying to them. I never heard back from most of the schools I applied to and the one or two that I did hear from just said "thanks for applying but..." or some variation on that theme.
In October of 2012 I was in an LTO position for the TDSB that was expected to end after 8 weeks. I was called by a school in Kansas to interview for an ESL job with the Kansas City Kansas Public Schools (KCKPS). I explained that I was under contract in Toronto but only short-term. A Skype interivew was arranged instead. Contrary to all my expectations I was offered the job and it was a Full Contract position! The pay was a much lower than the pay in Toronto (approxamately 56% of the TDSB wage) but I was assured by friends and family that the cost of living was also lower. I accepted the job. (Within a month the Ontario provincial governement passed Bill 115 which included Regulation 274. If I had stayed in Ontario just one month longer that regulation would have set me on a path towards a full-contract job in Ontario. But I knew none of that in November of 2012)
I broke my LTO contract, broke my lease on the apartment my family lived in (thereby incurring a $3000 penalty), rented a truck, and moved my wife and two sons to Kansas. Where I made a series of extremely unplesant discoveries.
The salary I was offered is not what I was going to be paid. My salary was to be pro-rated as I had been hired mid year. So for the first 10 months I worked in Kansas I was paid half of what I had been offered.
I was not being credited with any teaching experience. I was being paid as if I had just graduated from university and had never set foot inside a classroom before. I protested that I had almost 12 years of full time teaching experience but was told "we don't recognize substitute work". All those LTOs I had done were considered nothing more than substitute teaching by the KCKPS.
The cost of living in Kansas is lower than the cost of living in Toronto, Canada... but not enough low to compensate for the drastically lower wage I was being paid. Add in the pro-rating that was being done to my salary and the situation was much more grim. My family was in the red almost every month we lived in Kansas. I was a professional, employed full-time, and my family had to visit a food bank on a regular basis because we could not afford groceries. A co-worker bought me groceries on at least one occasion. Our rent took almost all of my pay each month. Utilities and other fixed costs took the rest.
Health insurance is unaffordable and the ACA is a mirage. The Affordable Care Act does not apply if one's employer offers health insurance. It doesn't matter how expensive the employer-based insurance is. That it is offered is enough to make one ineligable for the ACA. One of the fixed costs I mentioned in the previous paragraph was health insurance. I was paying $750/month. Maybe that is high. Maybe that is not. On my salary it was extortionate. I've tried so far to avoid inflammatory language but on this I will make an exception.
Should I have known this before quitting a good, but insecure, job and moving my family halfway across the continent? Yes. I should have. But I didn't even know I should have known these things. My ignorance hurt me and it hurt my family.
Over time things did get better. We qualified for social assistance. It wasn't much but it helped. (So I was a professional, working full time, receiving social assistance, and still needing to visit a food bank on a regular basis, just in case you're keeping track) Because our older son has type 1 diabetes he qualifed for special assistance and state-provided health insurance. That covered some of his health needs but not all. It didn't lower the $750/month by even a penny though. That covered my wife and our second child. After ten months the KCKPS stopped pro-rating my salary and we were able to breathe a little bit financially. We could even pretend we were in the black by acting as if making maintainence payments on our debts counted. (I tried working overtime in the school's tutoring lab but discovered that doing so reduced the social assistance we received by enough that the increased hours resulted in a net decrease in our household income.) Our children were happy and healthy. My family was happy to have me in their local area. My sister moved to Kansas City as well and our children could all play together.
Could we have stayed? Perhaps. We could have toughed it out. Our financial situation was gradually improving. I could see that in 20 years we would be out of debt... assuming no emergencies occured. However both Jeny and were increasingly unhappy. Neither of us ever were diagnosed or sought treatment but both of us displayed several symptoms of depression. All of Jeny's family and the majority of her friends live in Toronto. There is a Filipino population in Kansas City but it is very small. She felt very isolated and very alone. I was not much better. My family lives there but these are people I'd seen only during the summers and at Christmas. I didn't really know them any better than Jeny did. I realized that inspite of my roots there it was a foreign country to me. Almost all of my friends are in the Toronto area. Jeny and I got involved in groups and activities but never really felt at home.
I had been hired as an ESL teacher but I realized I didn't like teaching ESL. In January of 2014 when schools begin looking for staff I spoke with my Principal and explained I'd like to move to teaching History, which is what I am really intrested in. She sympathized with my desire to teach a subject I like but said that the school didn't need any additional History teachers. Yet in August of 2014 when the next semester began there was a brand new history teacher on staff in addition to the ones from the year before.
As a teacher in Toronto I had a great deal of professional autonomy. In the KCKPS I had almost none. Professional Development days were largely exercises in telling the teachers things they already knew and had known for years. The KCKPS has an annual event called Commencement. Teachers are required to attend. It is held a day or two before classes begin August. It is essentially a pep rally for the school board. It goes on for hours, hypes things far beyond any sense, tells us absolutely nothing of substance, and is very expensive for the Board to put on. It is simultaneously aggravating and insulting. Teachers who skip it are reprimanded and may have their pay docked.
Health insurance was unaffordably expensive but the health care we received was fine. We never had any complaints about the care itself. However every month, every single month, Jeny would be on the phone with insurance company because they were refusing to pay for something that the policy clearly stated that they would pay for. Our son has type 1 diabetes. It is an incurable autoimmune disorder. He is going to incur health care costs every day of his life. Our policy had a $2500 individual deductable. In a normal year his diabetic costs would come to about $2400. So we were paying 100% of his diabetic care costs out of pocket.
My wife was lonely and depressed. I was professionally frustrated, lonely, and depressed. Both of us were homesick. Yet had I been paid a wage that would have provided more than a subsistance level standard of living we might have stayed. Maybe not. Being profoundly unhappy could have overruled financial security. Had I been paid according to my experience we would most likely have stayed.
The constant cuts to education by the Kansas state government force the school boards to pay the teachers as little as possible. I'm sure the schools would like to pay teachers enough to keep them. Other teachers I worked with spoke openly about wanting to leave. My cousin who is also a teacher in Kansas told me that most of the staff at his school check the job boards daily.
In October of 2014, after yet another phone call to the health insurance company, Jeny told me she wanted to move back to Toronto. I had just learned that our health insurance premiums would be going up by $50/month. My pay was not going up by $50/month.
So I quit a full-contract job, gave a letter of non-renewal of lease to our landlord, rented a truck, and moved my family back to Toronto. We are home and we are happier. Happy to be here. Happy to be close to our friends.
I don't have a job at all here. Regulation 274, which would have been a boon to me in 2012, is now the single biggest obstacle to my employment. Principals who would like to call me in for substitute work or LTOs are prohibited from doing so as a consequence of Regulation 274. We've been home for seven months and so far I've not even had an interview for teaching, much less a job. I did manage to get work teaching summer school because it operates under slightly different rules. However that has no bearing whatsoever on regular school year teaching.
Jeny does not have a job here either but she has to possibility of work. Both of us have taken classes to increase our qualifications and therefore employability.