Education- Free for all

The district I work for agreed Wednesday, July 13, to honor the agreement they made with the teachers back in May of 2010. In this agreement, the teachers took a pay cut, the school year was shortened by 5 days, and no one was laid off. This school year has been a tug of war between district officials who were convinced that lay-offs, larger class sizes, and further cuts to the classroom were necessary and teachers who simply wanted to stick to the May 2010 agreement. Over four hundred teachers finished the school year not knowing until last week if they had a job or not. The source of all this turmoil? The uncertainties in the budget for the State of California.
Eleven years ago, I started teaching in Elk Grove. I had grown up here, left, came back. I graduated from Elk Grove High in '77. My daughter graduated from Elk Grove High in 2007. I wanted to teach in Elk Grove because the district and school board had a commitment to students. They sought the best teachers, and got them through a competitive salary schedule and cooperative management. Teachers and management worked together.
That all changed with Dr. Ladd's arrival. Was it him? Or did he arrive just when the state started to short schools on funding? I'm not sure which came first. Now we seem stuck with management who sees teachers as commodities. The attitude is, "well, if you don't like it, you can always go somewhere else". They know we can't go anywhere else. There are too many teacher lay-offs everywhere.
And what about the kids? You know; the consumers of education who can't vote? What about them? In the middle of the shortage of funding and arguments over cuts in the system, the kids are still here! They continue to need an education and they need teachers to provide it. We don' t often hear about the students. When anti-teacher sentiment is rampant and everywhere you turn teachers are blamed, I do not often see students at the center of the conversation.
I propose a change. If you feel compelled to blame, please stop and think a minute about how students will be educated without teachers to do the job. The reality is, without us, there is no school. With fewer teachers, the classes are larger. Thomas Jefferson believed that education should be under the control of the government, free from religious biases, and available to all people irrespective of their status in society. We need teachers to make that happen. We need adequate funding from the State to make that happen. The idea of Free education for all is an American idea. I believe like Jefferson did, that every student should have access to a free education. I hope our conversations around education can focus on that end.