Teachers Need Paid Classroom Setup Time

What do teachers want more than anything else at back to school time?

It is not gifts.

It is not presence.

It is not professional development.

It is time to work in classrooms.

That is what teachers want more than anything else.

It's what they need.

And when they don't get it, they feel a sense of anxiety and pressure and kind of FOMO on the time that it takes.

to just get your classroom ready for the school year.

So if teachers are sitting in hour after hour and day after day of professional development, a lot of the time they're thinking about what all the stuff they need to be doing in their classrooms.

If this is true for you, leave a comment and let me know.

But I've heard from so many people who said, we have five days of professional development and no paid time to work in our rooms.

We have 10 days of professional development and one hour to work in our rooms.

And I will not say as a principal that I blocked off huge numbers of days of paid time for people to work in their classrooms, but I definitely got the sense that every moment in classrooms was appreciated, that teachers need time to physically set up their classrooms, to mentally prepare for how they're going to begin the year, to plan, to collaborate on their own, not in some sort of mandatory meeting, but just to work with the people that they need to work with to get stuff figured out.

There's a lot of coordination between specialists, between special ed teachers and gen ed teachers and therapists and people who otherwise share students that just needs to happen and people need time to make that planning happen.

be effective and physically, you know, people often complain about just the very short turnaround time and the lack of paid time to get their classroom set up, right?

Often classrooms are completely cleaned out and the floors are redone in the summers and people might only have a few, you know, window of a few days to physically move all their stuff back in and put things back on the walls, you know, if there was painting or if everything got taken down for testing.

There's just a lot of physical labor that goes into getting a classroom ready for the school year.

And I have this crazy idea that is not an original idea.

I think a lot of people feel this way, but it seems to be very rare.

I have this crazy idea that that should be paid time.

Physically setting up your classroom for the school year should be on the clock.

You should be paid to do it.

And in a lot of cases...

You know, anytime that students are not in the classroom, there's this idea that, well, you have to be doing meetings and professional development during that time.

If you don't have students, you know, physically in the room, you're not doing anything unless you're having professional development or meetings.

And I think we've really got to respect the work that happens outside of class time as part of teaching and as deserving to be paid.

Let me know what you think.

How much time do you get to set up your room on the clock?

And how much time would you like to have?

Let me know.