From Harford County Public Schools:
The Wakefield Building of Homestead/Wakefield Elementary School will be closed tomorrow, Monday, June 15, 2015 due to a mechanical failure. There will be no pre-k. The Homestead Building will remain open and operational. All staff are to report for regular hours. Please note, this means students that attend class in the Wakefield Building will not have school tomorrow. Students that attend class in the Homestead Building will have school tomorrow.
…and great teachers continue to leave Harford County. What a shame.
…and HCPS will easily rehire great teachers who weren’t get paid as good from somewhere else.
If low pay is such an issue, no one should get hired because you’d have to be completely dishonest to be inclined to move forward.. Alas…, we have a bunch of bullshitting going on during HCPS HR employment interviews.
Anyone who is anyone gets hired at HCPS knowing steps haven’t been increased in years. Hell, HR people probably even mention it.
Any teacher who has any level of quality teaching experience knows better than to apply for a job with HCPS. Amost all candidates HCPS is able to hire are teachers right out of college that couldn’t get a job anywhere else and non-certified career changers.
… and 1 in 5 posts here are bitch-o-matic government employees oblivious to real world economics.
More claptrap from the overpaid babysitters of Harford county.
Sounds like a troll to me.
Anyways, if teachers are overpaid in Harford County, how come so many of them have left and are leaving for higher paying teacher positions in neighboring counties?
Why dobneighboring counties have so many vacancies?
Seems like an endless cycle, employees in another county aren’t get paid enough so they go somewhere else, so forth and so on.
It sounds like you hate capitalism and free markets.
in one case they have a growing population and in another they have 4 times as many students!
If your statement is true, why is it that Harford County Schools ranked 5th in the State for 2014 while Montgomery County teachers the highest paid but schools ranked 11th.
More money does not always product better results.
Montgomery isn’t the highest paid!!!! It will take a little while before you start seeing it affect test scores. You are already spending more money of PD than ever before. As a result the technology budget is underfunded to pay for all the PD the new teachers require.
Hear that? Hear wut? The sound of bullshit.
Every year we hear about how Harford County isn’t honoring teacher contracts. Nice use of words, perhaps someone with half a brain can wonder why the teachers “union” isn’t in court for such a breech of contract? Hear that? Crickets?
We also hear year after year how “test scores” and how the world is going to end at HCPS, but nope. Sure enough, everything goes as good as it was last year.
I would say you are underestimating the number of postings from teachers and government workers complaining about their salaries, working conditions, etc here on the Dagger. However, the original post is correct, “great teachers are leaving Harford County.” Please don’t blame these teachers for leaving. In fact, they have been encouraged by many people on this site to leave. Unfortunately, you will be left with the school system that they leave behind, which is in pretty bad shape.
As long as test scores are above the minimum and AP enrollment increases annually, HCPS believes itself to be successful.
And as long as test scores are less than maximum, and every student is not enrolled in AP classes and achieving perfect scores on AP tests, you believe HCPS to be a failure.
Extremism is a mindset that can go in more than one direction.
Actually the opposite.
I believe AP classes should be for the truly college-bound to knock out a few classes early and prepare themselves for rigorous college studies, the administrators should actively discourage unprepared students from taking AP classes, require the preceding teacher’s endorsement for each student, and require prepayment of the AP test fee.
HCPS’s position of every student will go to college is a farce and the administration knows it, but saying so will get you fired.
A few years back there was an education “summit” in Annapolis regarding how to better prepare students for college. One of the people on the summit was the chancellor of the higher education system of Maryland. His recommendation was to get as many students as possible in AP courses, and taking the AP exams. What wasn’t revealed at the summit was that in addition to being the chancellor of the state higher ed system, he was also on the Board of Directors of the College Board, the company that administers (read: gets paid for) the AP tests.
The College Board reports to sources such as U.S. News and World Report, and other sources that put out the annual ratings of schools across the country. Guess which schools are THE BEST? The ones who have the highest percentages of students enrolled in AP courses, and taking (read: paying for) the AP tests.
When HCPS schools don’t make a good showing on the list, people ask why. And some don’t ask why, they simply condemn the system for not being up to snuff.
Kind of a catch-22, don’t you think? At any rate, now you know why the push for AP.
I work in HR but not for HCPS, in another area.
Teachers quit every year. Some find out the grass isn’t greener on the other side and reapply.
We keep track of the one’s who leave snarky, arrogant, self righteous comments to anyone at any point of their departure. Why?
I’ve been personally instructed to delete applications of those who reapply after leaving in a distasteful way.
“We keep track of the one’s who leave snarky, arrogant, self righteous comments to anyone at any point of their departure”…..LOL. yea..sure you do.
Yeah. I sure do. I’m not speaking on anonymous internet posts, but out of order professionalism.
I’m sure HCPS HR does the same, there are lots of secret squirrel behind the scene “stuff.”
I actually believe deleting applications would be against the law!!!!!
If this person works for HR at a private company then it is not illegal. It’s just the 21st century version of the round file.
There are idiots everywhere, Concerned Teacher.
Not sure but I believe that all paperwork must be retained for EEOC purposes.
I run my own business, your application has an equal opportunity in the trash can as someone else.
Huzzahhh!!
A mechanical failure at the school? Well that means it’s time to build a new one.
Would you buy a new house because your AC or heat pump went up? A new mechanical system may cost a couple million, a new building 50+ million. Where is the county going to find that kind of money? The County Executive has put a hold on virtually all new Capital spending because our debt service on bonds from the last administration is eating far too much of the county revenue. Having an out of balance debt to revenue ratio threatens our AAA bond rating – which the bonding agencies have said is at risk if we continue to accumulate debt as we have for the past several years. There is nothing wrong with older buildings as long as they are properly maintained and renovated as necessary.
But, but, but, students learn better in a fresh concrete box vs an old concrete box!