Summary
You have just played a game where you experience what a teacher has to go through when you see the Teacher:Student Ratio increase. It gives teachers less time to interact with each student and affecting classrooms in our communities. It is essential for students to have a good learning environment from K-12, to fully develop their skills and prepare students for oppurtunities and society. Having a large student to teacher ratio can be dangerous if budget cuts are continuing to rise and teachers getting laid off. Students will not be able to interact and get the education they need and will be more distracted and not focused on their education, which is important for their future careers. We want to raise awareness by showing how hard it is for a teacher to manage 30 students! Thats the average for 7-8th grade! Even more for Physical Education and some arts classes. WE need our community to raise awareness for the budget cuts that is happening in the bay area and around the country.
One example in our community in the bay area that is affected by this is the West Contra Coastal Unified School District, which is just Northeast of San Francisco Unified School District and North of Oakland. They are currently in a budget crisis and they are forced to lay off more than 250 jobs, which will save over 16 million dollars. $6 million in contracts, $2 million in school site funds, $2 million by eliminating the positions of 10 high-level administrators, and negotiating the remaining $6 million with its three other unions that represent non-teaching workers such as instructional assistants, as well as supervisors and administrators.
Another example of this is when Oakland Unified Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell proposed to lay off more than 68 staffers to come up with more than half of the $21.5 million that the district says it needs to cut from next year’s budget. Johnson-Trammell said the layoffs could save up to $12.3 million. This shows that in our community in the bay area, our education system is having major budget problems and they are forced to fire teachers. This will lead to an increase in student to teacher ratio, which will greatly affect the classrooms. We need to act now because many of our future generations are lacking in essential learning skills.