Bartlett School District Meeting is Tuesday, 10 articles to be decided

If you are reading this thank you for caring about our Bartlett school district. I can clear up some confusion here. As a parent with kids in the school and as a former teacher at that school as well (now turned business owner), I have seen this situation play out for several years, and the scores fall due to a mass exodus of our school staff. Being a friend and colleague of the staff that is currently there, and the ones that leftover the years I would ask them why they were leaving:

1. The pay is too low. It has been for a long time. Bartlett did not keep up with other districts. The starting salaries may be similar for teachers, but after a few years, the other districts outpay us. Several excellent younger teachers compared the pay of the districts to decide where to establish their careers long-term. The gap they told me many times was about a $20,000 difference a year for the same job. That's huge!! That was even announced at a staff meeting by a leaving teacher at one point.

2. Housing. We would hire staff but they wouldn't be able to find housing in the area. I should change that to change and afford housing in the area. So they turned the job down. So far no one has found a legal solution to fix this. So again, it comes down to paying for the staff to be able to find housing to work at Bartlett. So yes, it does come down to pay, thus the warrant article to help fix this.

3. Disrespect and disdain towards the staff from the longest-standing board member ( who is running again right now). When you threaten the remaining staff's jobs by telling them you want to close their group of the school, or tell them they are not any better than another profession so why pay them more, or not allow them to have their children attend the school they work at so they can be on the same vacation schedules and start and end times together for more buy-in from the staff to stay(years of public outcry and lost staff later this was recently finally fixed), and newspaper quotes such as "poor teachers" are just A FEW examples of why this person (who is running again right now) has personally lost us a lot of valuable staff members. Please vote this person out.

4. Lack of staff positions filled means more strain on behavior management in classrooms. Staff needs those positions filled and strong backup from admin at all times.

5. Lack of positions filled means more work for the ones that remain and often for no extra pay for that extra work. That strain adds up as frustration to resentment and staff leave to find better employment.

To be clear these have all been addressed to the board multiple times FOR YEARS. To get us to this point of warrant articles and multiple people running for 2 spots on this board for necessary change. We are in a crisis at this point.

Thank you for reading.