Teachers' duties benefit admin

Rita Nicholson

Copy Editor

With the many courses offered at SHS, some teachers are finding themselves in new roles for 2019-2020 school year.

“The class sizes are interesting because we offer so many things. We offer a lot of classes, more than a lot of other schools that are our size. As a school, we’re only 800 kids. If we offered 800 classes, we would have one kid per class,” Assistant Principal Jeff Cox said.

Due to the large number of classes offered, class sizes may already be small. If a class is small enough, the students may end up being moved into another period.

Several teachers have experienced classes that are too small.

Jason Bagwell’s seventh period psychology class only had four people in it. These students were moved into another class period, and Bagwell had an open period in his schedule. As a result, Bagwell, among other teachers, was assigned a duty.

“I am in charge of traffic flow, so I have to get the car rider line out, the people coming from around the building, the people that drive the trucks and slow them all down when the buses are coming out,” Bagwell said.

He said jokingly, “I have a master’s degree, so hopefully, I can direct traffic. I would think I’m gonna get some kind of award for being able to clear the parking lot. I’m fully anticipating there’ll be a plaque.”

Teacher Michael Sims has also been assigned a duty this year due to a small class size. His fourth period, Principles of Business Management, had five students, so after they were moved into another class period, Sims had to start supervising the Commons during lunch.

Having teachers in the Commons helps relieve some pressure off administration.

“The last few years, all of the administrators have been at lunch, and we stayed all three lunches. It takes up a lot of our day. An hour and a half of our day [was] spent walking the lunchroom, and that’s not the greatest use of time,” Cox said. “In order to free us up to be able to do administrative stuff, we [gave] some teachers … assigned duties. That would free us up to do other stuff.”

Teachers’ assigned duties help custodians do their jobs as well.

“[Assigned duties] put people who have the authority of the teachers helping with situations that have high student traffic,” Cox said.

He said that the teachers’ duties in turn help the custodians.

“[Custodians] are supposed to be cleaning things. Student behavior really isn’t their job,” he said. “[Teachers in the commons] let them do their job.”

The teachers with duties have been happy to help.

“Anything I can do to help, I’m more than willing to do it,” said Sims

Bagwell agreed.

“I think that [assigned duties are] a good use of resources, especially since [the administrators] don’t have a whole lot of help. We don’t care to kick in and help,” Bagwell said.

Cox said that he advocated for assigned duties.

“It keeps class sizes where they should be. Also if [teachers] didn’t have assigned duties and they had open spots in their schedules, it might get to the point where we have more teachers than we need. That could end up with laying off teachers. We don’t want to do that,” Cox said.