Year’s end doesn’t mean work ends for Chatham’s school teachers

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BONLEE — Bonlee School Principal Kim Taylor said she hadn’t had a solid lunch for a whole week.

She snacked, but nothing full. That’s what the last week of school is like.

It was the last day with students, Friday, June 7, but for Taylor and other Chatham County Schools teachers and administrators, some things were just beginning.

“Once they head out, we might actually get lunch today,” she said. “After that, we try to take this afternoon to take a deep breath, and then we begin to look at the schedule.”

Education personnel will tell you that just because students aren’t in the building, that doesn’t mean work stops. Administrators work on scheduling and goal-setting for the whole school, while teachers clean and prep for the next year.

Taylor said she takes Bonlee’s mottos into account when planning ahead.

“I believe that building relationships is key to anything, and that’s students staff and their families,” she said. “Our motto — other than ‘learn, lead, live’ — is that they’re safe, that they’re loved and that they’re not hungry. If those three things take place, the learning can happen from that.”

One of the key parts of that is grade configuration, or where each teacher will be placed for the next year. It’s one of the first steps Bonlee School administrators take after the bell rings on the final day.

“It’s very hard to make a schedule for a K-8 school,” she said. “This afternoon, we start doing that. Next week, we will plug in schedule teachers. Then we dive into the data to talk about kids and class placement.”

At Jordan-Matthews High School in Siler City, Principal Tripp Crayton has already done that. It’s a process that started in January with student sign-ups and ended on Friday with assignments handed out to teachers. The schedule will be adjusted over the summer when test grades come in or summer school is completed if a student needs to re-take a class. And that’s just the first part.

“There’s a lot that goes on,” Crayton said. “It’s a lot more relaxing because you don’t have students or teachers around and you have time to actually think.”

Principals will plan teacher development, analyze test scores and other data and balance schedules. But they’ll tell you nearly unanimously: the work doesn’t stop.

Some Chatham teachers say it doesn’t really end for them either.

“It’s never the end of the year,” said Stacie Perry, a 4th- and 5th-grade language arts teacher at Bonlee. “A teacher never stops teaching or never stops planning. I’m always looking for things I can bring back. My brain never turns off.”

Perry gets feedback from her students on the arrangement of desks and computer programs used in class as part of prepping for the coming year, which will be her 22nd. Colleague Dianna Ritter, a 7th-grade math and science instructor at Bonlee, will do a lot of thinking early on in the post-student days.

“Most of the time, you’re cleaning up your rooms,” she said. “Carpets have to be cleaned, floors have to be waxed and cleaned. So you’re boxing up everything and making sure everything is complete there. (Then) you just reflect about the whole school year, see what changes (you’re) going to make for the next year.”

Doug Riggs, an English teacher at Jordan-Matthews, said he likes to go ahead and plan at least the first two weeks of the next school year.

“On a normal year, if we have an idea of what we’re teaching next year, go ahead and make sure you’ve got things ready,” he said. “When you come back from the summer, there’s a lot to do. It can get pretty overwhelming trying to set up for a new semester.”

Both Crayton and Amy Phillips, the curriculum coach at Bonlee School, said it’s important for teachers to take a break and recharge so students can get the best our of their instructors.

“(Rest is) something that we have to work on really hard,” Phillips said. “It sounds crazy, but that has to be one of our goals, to actually just decompress. You’re on every second that you’re here. There’s not a down time. If we’re not taking care of ourselves, we’re not going to be any good for our kids.”

Crayton added, “Our staff works extremely hard. Over the summer, it’s good that they get a chance to sit back and reflect and take a few weeks to say, ‘I’m not thinking about school.’ If you’re stressed over the summer and you come back stressed, it’s a never-ending cycle.”

But when the rest is over, it’s time to get back to work. There are only 80 days between June 7 and August 26, when Chatham County Schools students return to class. And those students will likely be on the receiving end of work that started months before they returned to campus.

“Everything we’re celebrating right now actually started at the end of last year,” Phillips said. “We’re already setting student focus goals for next year, so we’ll hit the first day of school running next year. Throughout the summer, we will be working to not only build the schedule that meets those needs, but work on any strategies that need to improve.”

Reporter Zachary Horner can be reached at zacharyhornereu@gmail.com or on Twitter at @ZachHornerCNR.