MD State Board of Ed. discusses education priorities, staffing shortages addressed

 

MARYLAND- The Maryland State Board of Education held a meeting Tuesday discussing several Board of Education priorities.

On, the agenda there was public comment and conversation on COVID-19, updates on local school system virtual programs, review of reopening logistics, and more.

Cheryl Bost, the President of the Maryland State Education Association, brought up a major concern for her during the meeting.

Saying across the state we are seeing teacher and staffing shortages.

She says being an educator she heard about the shortages that schools would face when the baby boomers retired, but now with the pandemic that has amplified.

“We see the shortages for bus drivers but what we don’t really see is the shortages within the classrooms, I think every district in this state has shortages of teachers, class sizes are doubled up, they’re just putting anyone in rooms, we don’t have substitutes in the districts so we need to figure this out,” Bost said.

Bost also has some other concerns saying we need to look at what we are doing with our educators during the quarantine when it comes to sick leave and contact tracing.

Adding, that school nurses are overworked because they are trying to be a school nurse, on top of the huge responsibility of contract tracing.

She said the workload for educators during quarantine also needs to be looked at because factors like make up work is hurting the time of the teachers.

“We have to look at this as a long term issue because the pipeline has dropped for many of our subject areas, so I would ask that we put together some type of group, higher ed, and our educators and everybody to look at how we can resolve this, what are the points in the blueprints that are going to help us and what are some other things, especially since we are an import state here,” Bost said.

Bost said maybe to help fix the issue of contact tracing for the school nurses is to have more partnerships with the health departments to be able to put people into their buildings.