On the 7th day, she quit
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20081008_On_the_7th_day__she_quit.html?viewAll=y
On the 7th day, she quit
1st-time teacher, 23, cites vulgar, violent, unsupportive climate
By MENSAH M. DEAN
Philadelphia Daily News
deanm@phillynews.com 215-854-5949
LOOKING BACK on her brief stint as a Philadelphia schoolteacher causes "Rebecca" to shake her head sorrowfully. Every day of that career, she says, she had to break up fights between her fourth-graders, who cursed and threatened each other - often making good on the taunts.
She spent far more time on discipline than on teaching.
Administrators at Samuel H. Daroff School offered her little help and did not provide a promised mentor teacher, she says.
So, on the seventh day of classes, Rebecca quit - walking away from a $41,000-a-year job in the School District of Philadelphia.
Rebecca - not her real name - has $50,000 in student loans, but says she does not regret leaving because her mental health was at stake.
"It was the worst experience of my life," she says of the first day of class, Sept. 4, at the West Philadelphia school.
"I was so excited and there were so many things that I wanted to do with the kids," she continues, noting that she'd spent nearly $500 of her own money on supplies for the students.
"But when the kids got into the classroom, it was a nightmare."
The nightmare reached its peak Friday, Sept. 12, when one boy punched another in the face, prompting the victim to hit his attacker with a chair.
Rebecca says she called the school's secretary and asked that the lone security officer be sent to her room. The officer never showed up.
Walking out the door that day, she thought: "This is not going to be my reality for the next nine months. It just can't be."
Rebecca never returned.
The 23-year-old Philadelphia native asked that her real name not be published because she is seeking a new teaching job in the region.
She graduated from the school district, and applied only to it for her first job.
Her abrupt departure underscores the difficulty the 165,000-student district has in retaining new teachers.
During September, in addition to Rebecca, 10 teachers new to the profession resigned, said Cecilia Cummings, a district spokeswoman.
Thirty-five experienced teachers also resigned and nine have retired, the district said.
Still, when told of Rebecca's story, Daroff's principal, Robert Rouse, indicated that Rebecca's experience was not the norm.
Rouse, Daroff's third principal in eight years, said he was unaware of the incidents that Rebecca described to the
Daily News. He said he visits each classroom every morning and saw her students seated and orderly, except one boy, whom he removed from the class on the second day of school, at 56th and Vine streets.
Rouse, whose son is a Daroff sixth-grader, said that although Rebecca spoke of concerns to the school's assistant principal, she never told him of any problems. She filed no incident reports, he said.
The school, which enrolls 867 students in kindergarten through eighth grade, is safe, having logged only two incidents this year, Rouse insisted.
"You can walk my halls. There is no one in the halls, walking the halls or cursing anyone. . . . You can talk to the volunteers that support the school. They'll tell you. I would not have my own son go to the school if I didn't think it was safe."
Rebecca's departure, though, has left him puzzled. She interviewed well, Rouse said, and he thought her students had taken a liking to her.
Problems at Daroff, however, were reported by the
Daily News in March 2006. The students were so out of control that the regional superintendent, Shiril Gilbert, canceled all of Daroff's field trips, the newspaper reported.
Parents and the school were failing to work together to get the kids to behave, Gilbert said at the time.
One 7-year-old girl, he recalled, "cursed me as bad as any adult has ever cursed me in my life."
Rebecca said two seventh-grade girls spoke to her in vulgar language for no apparent reason.
She quit before she could be assigned a new-teacher coach, Cummings said. Rouse insisted, also, that the school has its own teacher-mentor program, which was made available to Rebecca.
She says that was not the case.
District Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said she has increased the number of new-teacher coaches from 11 to 30. These veteran educators act as mentors to new hires across the district.
Ackerman, who started her job June 2, asked the
Daily News to put her in touch with Rebecca to learn firsthand why the young teacher had fled her classroom.
"The fact that she left raises more questions for me than an absolute 'I understand.' Because I'm not sure. I don't know the circumstances, I don't know how well she was prepared. I don't know what kind of support was given to her," Ackerman said.
"So, it's a very complex issue. I guess I'd really like to talk to her. She's the exception, obviously, not the rule."
Officials from the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) said this year they have launched their own pilot training program for a limited number of new teachers and sent orientation literature to the homes of all new hires. But more support is needed from the district, union officials said.
"One of the problems that we have in not being able to reduce the vacancy number is that when people are hired other people are quitting. So it's important that they get the assistance that they need to be successful," said PFT President Jerry Jordan.
Rebecca contacted the
Daily News after reading a Sept. 25 article about the district's teacher-vacancy rate being at an eight-year high. The district had 169 vacancies at that time. As of the last day of September, the district was still scrambling to fill 144 teacher positions, said Fernando Gallard, a district spokesman.
In the article, Jordan said the teacher shortage was tied to uncertainty over the recently expired teacher contract.
District officials said the problem was the result of a national shortage of music teachers and, within the district, a shortage of math, science, Spanish and special-education teachers.
Rebecca, who in May graduated with honors from one of the Philadelphia region's leading teaching universities, says those explanations are nothing more than cover-ups.
Teachers are fleeing the district, she reasons, because they are tired of having to put up with out-of-control students while receiving little or no help from school administrators.
"Those people who are higher up in the district need to get honest about what is going on in the schools in this city. You cannot hide behind music-teacher and special-education-teacher shortages and an interim contract," she huffs, seated at the dining-room table in the tidy Northeast Philadelphia townhouse she shares with her parents.
"That's not why there are teaching positions available here. I can only speak for myself - I am a teacher. I'm not a janitor. I'm not a parent. I'm not a referee. I'm not hosting a boxing match in my class."
Case sounds weak to me.