Budget cut misconceptions debunked

Serena Bettis • May 19, 2016

In light of recent budget cuts and the announcement from Fossil Ridge High School’s administrative team that seven teachers will not return for the 2016-2017 school year, it is important for students to stay informed on Fossil’s future. Many students make comments such as, “They should fire Teacher X because he looked at me funny in the hallway,” or “The only reason Mrs. Y hasn’t been fired is because she has tenure.” Ignorance about the process the administration undertakes as they look at the school budget and determine what teachers will not return creates rumors everywhere in the school. Here are some of those rumors, debunked:

Teachers with tenure cannot be fired. – MYTH

This statement is slightly true, slightly not, and one of the biggest things that’s wrong with it is the fact that teachers do not actually have tenure anymore, they are either probationary or not. While it is true that non-probationary teachers are guaranteed a job, that job is within the Poudre School District, not solely at Fossil. In order for a non-probationary teacher to be relieved of their position, there needs to be sufficient evidence that they are not performing well or they have committed a felony. You may think that one math teacher of yours is the worst person on the planet, but that does not mean that they are not properly doing their job.

New teachers are more likely to be let go. – FACT

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Any teacher hired in PSD, no matter their experience, is a probationary teacher. For the first three years, their job is not guaranteed, and that teacher can be non-renewed for many reasons, the main one being a lack of funds. This school year, no new teacher is being let go because of poor performance, but many will not return in the fall due to extreme budget cuts.

A teacher from another school might replace a teacher at Fossil. – FACT

Budget cuts similar to those seen at Fossil happen all over the district – in some cases, another high school in the district may not be able to support one of their non-probationary teachers, so that teacher will move to Fossil to replace a probationary teacher. This happens at Fossil, too. Some teachers do not fully lose their jobs, but they will get cut-down to part-time, and if they are non-probationary, they will spend the other part of their time at a different school.

Teachers from one department, such as the arts, are more likely to be let go because of a bias against the arts. – MYTH

When the reduction of teaching positions is only due to budget cuts, staff reduction is based on student enrollment for the following school year. Principal Will Allen says, “I had the burden of reducing our staff budget by a large amount of money. In order to do that, I had to look at all departments and all teachers within all departments, compared with the classes that students were enrolled in, and then I had to decide what we could afford and what we couldn’t afford.” If only ten people sign up for a fashion class, chances are the fashion teacher will be let go, reduced to part-time, or transition to teaching something else, because putting ten people in one class block means that a class of another subject will have to exceed approved class sizes. At the same time, the administration wants to ensure that students can take classes that interest them, so they try to balance out the cuts. Allen said, “We had to make certain decisions and try to spread out that impact across all of the different departments.”

Budget cuts are common, and students should not let the chaos of staff reduction make them worry about their future at Fossil.

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About the Contributor

Serena Bettis, Editor-in-Chief

Serena Bettis, senior, is entering into her third year on the Etched in Stone staff as this year’s Editor-in-Chief. A four year journalism student, she has high hopes for Etched in Stone this school year, and wants to be able to guide the staff in achieving their goals as much as possible. While Bettis has become a much more outspoken person than she was when she started at Fossil Ridge High School, she still finds discomfort speaking in front of large groups of people (“large” being defined anywhere from 6 to 30), but is more than ready to grow in that aspect of leadership over the course of the year. Most of her journalistic goals for the year are not personal, but rather involve the entire program. She aims to further improve upon the look of the Etched in Stone website, which she spent countless hours on her junior year, enough for it to win awards before she graduates.

Aside from Etched in Stone, Bettis takes part in the school marching, jazz, and concert bands as a flute player, volunteers with Key Club, and is the Historian for the National Honor Society. She has also held a part-time job at TCBY for over a year, and now knows more than she needs to about the sugar content in frozen yogurt. In her spare time, which is often hard to come by, Bettis can be found reading for fun, lamenting about how none of the new Young Adult romance novels she used to love so much are good anymore, working on making the perfect French macaron, or binge watching her recent addiction, Game of Thrones. Music is a large part of her life, and her favorite genre is difficult to describe because she listens to many different bands. Some of her favorites include twenty one pilots, All Time Low, and Halsey, more alternative bands such as Issues and SWMRS, pop artists including Carly Rae Jepsen (“she’s so much more than “Call Me Maybe””), and Little Mix, and various songs by Spanish singers.

She is more than ready for graduation, and aspires to be attending college in Chicago by this time next year. Bettis knows that she wants to double major in journalism and foreign languages, with a potential minor in music, though she is undecided on what specific occupation she wants after college. Her best advice to someone who does not know what they are interested in is to simply join different activities and see what happens from there. “Eventually, sometime during sophomore year, journalism became the only class I wanted to go to, and even now I love it more than I used to love band, so that’s when it hit me that this was what I wanted to be involved in for most of my life,” she said. Another somewhat undecided goal of hers is to join the Peace Corps either during or after college, and she hopes that an experience in a different country with complete strangers might help her figure out what exactly she wants to do with her life.