Teachers' Extreme Workload and Unfair Working Conditions: Presentation Before the School Board

"Teachers are professional employees exempt from the overtime requirements of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. There is no requirement to pay teachers time and a half for hours worked past the contracted workweek. However, there is a moral obligation to do so or to reduce the workload to a reasonable level. Giving an employee an excessive workload, knowing that they cannot complete the job in the 37.5 work-week is immoral and inhumane." Wendy L. Doromal

Overworked teacher by Diego Garcia ©2015

On April 8, 2014 I was scheduled to speak for five minutes before the School Board at the pre-school board meeting in the board conference room.  My statement:

My name is Wendy Doromal and I am here tonight as an OCPS teacher. I teach service learning and social justice issues at Timber Creek High School. Thank you for the opportunity to share my concerns with you about the current working conditions under which OCPS teachers struggle to complete mandated tasks.

I view teaching as an opportunity to instill in each and every one of my students the love of learning, to help them to discover their unique talents, and to encourage each one of them to fulfill their highest potential by reaching for the stars and beyond.

When I first became a teacher I loved teaching and I loved my job. I looked forward to going to school every day.  I still love teaching, but I do not have to look forward to going to school each day because school never leaves me. It follows me home in the form of piles of school-related work that I struggle to complete during nights, weekends and vacations. I feel that I cannot get away from the work. I have little time in my life for anything that is not school-related.

I am no longer primarily a teacher. I spend as much time proving my teaching abilities as I do actually teaching. Many of the district-mandated job duties given to teachers in recent years, have no apparent direct benefits for students or teachers. Teachers are expected to be data collectors, analysts, secretaries, bookkeepers, and consultants. In addition, we are expected to perform janitorial duties, fund raise, and tutor. Many of us are grant writers. Teachers are made to be unwilling participants in district grants that add even more requirements to our already overflowing plates.

Teachers’ work that has been directly related to classroom instruction has become unnecessarily rigid and micromanaged. Aside from student instruction, teachers spend many hours preparing over-detailed lesson plans, conducting research, creating innovative classroom activities, grading, mentoring, tracking student progress, filling out IEPs, contacting parents, designing bulletin boards, setting up student work stations, participating in professional development, designing deliberate practice plans, updating boards with goals and scales, and collaborating with other teachers.

Clearly adequate planning time is required for teachers to prepare quality lessons. Although teachers should have a minimum of 45 minutes of planning time every day, we do not. Much of our planning time has been taken away as we have to attend mandated PLC meetings, data collection meetings, and professional development sessions. Teachers have even been asked to attend data collection sessions during their lunchtime.

Six or seven years ago the week of pre-planning was devoted primarily to lesson planning and preparing our classrooms. Now the majority of the week is devoted to mandated professional development and meetings. Principals tell teachers that they will keep the schools open on the weekend before students’ first day of school so they can complete the planning and preparation. All of this extra work that teachers must complete on their own time is unpaid, of course.

The expectation of teachers and the workload given to them is inhumane. Teachers must spend 10, 20, 30 or more unpaid hours a week to complete mandated schoolwork.  They work after school, before school, weekends and during unpaid vacation time. Teachers, myself included, have taken personal days to catch up on their piles of school work. While our job responsibilities and task list have expanded, teachers have watched helplessly as our earnings and benefits have been reduced. Principals have threatened teachers with poor evaluations in Domain IV of the evaluation system if they do not complete assigned tasks.

Teachers at high schools like mine were given a 7^th period several years ago to save the district money.  However, we are not compensated for the work that goes along with having 25 or more students to teach, an extra class to plan for and extra papers to grade. This is another savings for the district on the backs of the teachers.

Teacher morale is at an all time low. Teachers feel uncertainty with job security and with the direction that our profession is headed. The climate of joy, dignity and respect that once existed in OCPS schools has been replaced by anxiety, stress, exhaustion and anger. The mutual respect and partnership that once existed between teachers and their school and district administrators is being eroded by mistrust, suspicion and resentment for the workload. 

Conversations between teachers were once dominated by successful lessons, information gained at conferences, exciting grant opportunities or other school-related news. Now conversations between teachers are dominated by job openings at companies who are hiring corporate trainers, what family event a teacher missed because she was doing school work, problems with the evaluation system, or what college a teacher will be attending to get a law degree.

Policy makers, most of whom have never taught a day in their lives, have reduced our profession to numbers. Numbers from students’ test scores, numbers from teachers’ evaluations, numbers and data to satisfy some grant or district or state requirement. Teachers are designated a number through a VAM score to receive a rating for students that we may have never even taught. Teachers are given a number from 0 to 4 to rate our ability to teach through an evaluation system that is administered inconsistently from school to school and even within the same school. While district leaders may view teachers’ salaries as a number, line item or budgetary expense, teachers view their salaries as an indication of fair payment knowing that their good work is an investment in the future.

Many of the numbers are manipulated or falsified. The ability for a teacher to fairly grade a student has been taken away. Now there is district technology that bumps any students’ report card or final exam grade that is below 50% to 50% or higher. The lowest score a student can receive for an end of course exam is a 59%. Where is the academic integrity in this?

Teachers are professional employees exempt from the overtime requirements of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. There is no requirement to pay teachers time and a half for hours worked past the contracted workweek. However, there is a moral obligation to do so or to reduce the workload to a reasonable level. Giving an employee an excessive workload, knowing full well that they cannot complete the job in the 37.5 work-week, is immoral and inhumane. Teachers are performing hundreds upon hundreds of hours each year without pay. Our salaries are already low –far below what other professionals with four-year college degrees earn. If you look at the amount of work that is unpaid, OCPS is taking millions from teachers each year.

Poor pay comes at high cost. Teachers have to weigh their love for teaching with the demands of paying bills and having free time in their off hours. Teachers are leaving the profession because of poor pay, excessive workload and unreasonable demands on their private lives.

Time is finite. It cannot be manipulated or stretched to meet the increasing workload. I calculated the school-related tasks that I completed off the clock every day for this school year. The unpaid hours I performed outside of the work week during the first semester totaled 630. Calculating by my hourly rate these hours represent $24,000 in unpaid wages. That is not time and one half for overtime pay, but just the straight pay calculation.

Having to work hundreds upon hundreds of unpaid hours a year not only steals money from teachers’ pockets, it steals time –time that can never be regained –time with family members, time with friends, time working at jobs that pay us for every hour that we work, and leisure time.  OCPS teachers deserve a fair salary that reflects the actual hours that we must work to ensure that our students can reach their highest academic potential.

I am requesting that OCPS hire a private consultant to conduct an independent task analysis to determine the time that it takes for teachers to conduct all of the tasks and duties that are assigned to them. The workload requirements for classroom teachers of every school must be determined so that the workload can be realigned to fit within the 37.5 hour workweek.

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I presented the School Board with a log I kept to document my unpaid hours. It included dates, a description of the school-related task, and the minutes and hours it took to complete each task. From July 2013 to the end of the first semester in January 2014 the unpaid hours I worked added up to 630. 

Superintendent Barbara Jenkins declined to conduct a task analysis. Her statement to me and to all OCPS teachers was to "work smarter, not harder."

Some school board members appeared sympathetic. However, since I spoke on this issue, teachers have been given even more tasks with no additional planning time and no additional pay. It should be easy to understand that if one attempts to put 5 cups of water into a two-cup container, it will overflow. This is exactly what OCPS teachers are facing – excessive work has overflowed into their private lives and free time.

What can teachers do? Stand united to ensure that the contract is enforced. There is no article in our contract that states we will give up planning time or work past our contracted 37.5 workweek. There is no article in our contract that states that we must create  specific lesson plans or post them online; that we must collect data; or that we must create common lessons and common assessments. Teachers can "work smarter" by working to the contract.