Montgomery County Educational Service Center Superintendent Shannon Cox said early learners are seeing pronounced learning gaps.
“But we also know that those are the kids that we can actually catch up most quickly,” Cox said. “There will be a lot of time, resources and dedication very intentionally placed at those early levels to ensure that we can close that gap more readily.”
Experts said the stressors from the pandemic led to a spike in teacher retirements at a time when children who suffered setbacks need more attention to catch up. They said the community needs to get the word out about how fulfilling and important a career educating children is, and we need to support educators as they take on this task.
David Taylor, superintendent of Dayton Early College Academy charter schools, said area schools are trying to target interventions, shrink class sizes and extend the school day.
“One of the major constraints is workforce and finding people who are qualified to do this work and also have the bandwidth to do it,” he said. “These last few years have been extraordinarily challenging for educators, and for many of them, even the offer of additional compensation isn’t enough to entice them because there’s so much burnout. They need time to rest.”
Robyn Lightcap, director of Preschool Promise, said pay is an issue for early childhood educators. She said a recent survey found lead teachers at local child care centers make an average of less than $15 an hour, and assistant teachers less than $12 an hour.
“I’m sure all of us would advocate that educators need to be paid better,” she said. “As a society, we don’t value educators in the way that we should.”
Teacher turnover
Taylor said at DECA they have seen more teachers leaving in the middle of the school year.
“For a lot of them, they can get a job that will pay just as much or more and they can work remotely,” he said. “They can find a job that isn’t as taxing. We would argue that it is nowhere near as rewarding.”
“We have to begin thinking differently about how we get educators ramped up quickly into the profession so they can be successful,” Taylor said.
Cox said the same holds true of leadership positions, with public school superintendents retiring or leaving the profession at an alarming rate, which could lead to a “domino effect” this coming hiring season.
“We may not have the human capital that we need to be able to fill all of these positions,” she said. “We are going to have to think about how we can be the architects of what education should look like in the future. And we have to do that right now.”
One area effort called I Educate Montgomery County launched recently to bring people from around the region together to address things like diversity and recruitment of teachers, Cox said.
Keeping kids healthy
The Dayton Daily News Community Conversation followed a recent Dayton Daily News story talking to parents, educators and child development experts about how children were impacted by the pandemic and how to help them.
Panelist Dr. Katherine Lambes, a local pediatrician with the Community Health Centers of Greater Dayton, noted the importance of taking care of children’s health needs.
“As a physician, we saw wellness checks and other routine immunizations drop off significantly at the beginning of the pandemic, and they’re just starting to get back in for routine care,” she said.
She also emphasized the importance of getting families vaccinated against COVID-19.
“Every protection you can give your yourself or your child against getting long COVID symptoms is important,” she said. “I’m going to give my children every protection they can get, because you don’t know when you get in that ‘COVID car accident’ whether it’s going to be a minor fender bender or a serious collision. I’m going to put their ‘seatbelt’ on every time — and that’s their COVID shot.”
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