the public school teachers of North Carolina have just received another stunning blow, we understand, from the State authorities who pass upon their certificates and rate them in their profession. A great mass of them who have been holding certificates entitling them to the highest pay allowed by the State have been reduced by two grades. If they were graded A, for instance, they are now graded C and the monthly difference in the salaries between the two grades is about $30.
It is understood that Superintendent Harding of the city schools and Superintendent Matthews of the county schools are very much agitated over what has been done through the use of the ukase (ukase is a proclamation or decree arbitrary in nature) of these State authorities. They may well be. It is unthinkable that school teachers who have been laboring in this community for a period of years and then getting less money than washerwomen employed by railways should be willing to accept a cut in their salaries of $30 per month. The natural outcome of such drastic and seemingly foolish action will be for these teachers to quit and find something else to do and these local superintendents know it.
We happen to know of some teachers in the city and county schools who have been drawing maximum salaries under A certificates, salaries of $135 per month, not only because they were originally qualified by scholastic preparation to become teachers, but because their experience of 20, 25, and 30 years has added to their proficiency. Some of these very teachers have been set back to class C and will draw salaries of $105 under this new ruling from Raleigh.
It would be grotesque for such teachers as these to accept a reduction in their salaries of $30 per month on such flimsy and foolish grounds as have been established by the State authorities. We imagine that some of them could stand up along with the very men and women who issued this dictum and put them in the shade when it comes to teaching school.
The situation which is developing as a result of this mandate from the imperial authorities at Raleigh will undoubtedly become serious all over the State as well as locally. The public school teachers of North Carolina have been getting only a paltry little salary for the magnificent work they have been doing and it was only after widespread and thorough-going agitation that they were enabled at length to get enough to live on. For them to accept, therefore, a material reduction in their salaries on such arbitrary grounds as this is simply unthinkable. They will join the countless others who became disgusted long ago and left the school rooms for some other line of work and thus the school houses of the State will become yet further depopulated and the cause of education languish.
It seems to be a rather non-essential and thoroughly indefensible development in North Carolina to pour millions of dollars into the institutions of higher learning, the three of them, and then bleed the public school teachers of the State to help make up the enlarged budget for such purposes. The people who need education in North Carolina are the children of the poorer classes. It is common schools that ought to be built up and developed. It is illiteracy that we need to drive out and until we really do attend to these foundations of our educational structure, then anything that we do for our higher institutions, pretentious and enormous it may be, is only spreading a veneer on.
Action just like that has been taken by the State authorities coming on the heels of what the Legislature did for three of the State’s splendid institutions is simply an argument that among some of the educational officials in North Carolina there is a misapprehension as to fundamentals.
From the editorial page of The Charlotte News, Monday, April 4, 1921
No comments:
Post a Comment