Nearly a year after strike, Pasco teachers get to work on new curriculum

It’s more than a month before students will be back in school, but many of Pasco’s teachers are already poring over textbooks and lesson plans.

More than 170 of them are crowded around tables in the Ellen Ochoa Middle School cafetorium or working out of classrooms to be ready to use the district’s new language arts and math materials this fall.

The work appears daunting at first, teachers and administrators say.

“People were walking out with that ‘brain’s full’ look in their eye,” said Suzanne Hall, the district’s director of innovation, of the teachers’ first day with the new materials.

But it’s also something they say is worth the effort. Lack of curriculum and materials was one of the main concerns raised by the teacher’s union that led to a strike and delay to the school year last fall.

There’s a lot of work ahead, teachers said, but they already feel better equipped to serve their students.

“We’re overwhelmed because we’ve gone from having nothing to so much,” said Laura Hirano, a teacher at Virgie Robinson Elementary School.

Under the new teacher contract, recommendations for new language arts and math materials for students in all grades were required by this spring. Science and arts recommendations are due to the board by spring 2017.

The new math and language arts materials, first vetted by appointed curriculum committees, are largely from publisher Houghton Mifflin — the Journeys/Senderos and Collections series for language arts and Math Expression series for elementary school math. The Agile Mind series, developed by an educational foundation, will be used in middle and high schools.

The new materials, which include textbooks but also workbooks and digital components, were selected for their ability to meet Pasco’s educational goals. It’s now up to the district and its teachers to figure out how that looks over the course of a school year.

That means sitting down and drafting curriculum guides, so teachers are consistently teaching on the same page at the same time in each school.

“What we’re doing is prioritizing for our kids,” said Kelly Doyle, a staff member at Virgie Robinson. “The student learners in Pasco are going to have different priorities than students in New York state.”

Teachers regularly take professional development courses, even in the summer, but administrators said the two weeks set aside for going over the new math and language arts materials is a heavy lift. It’s also coming right after some teachers went through other training earlier this month.

“It’s not like a fun conference or anything; this is real roll-up-your-sleeves work,” Hall said.

Despite the challenge, several teachers said they knew this work lay ahead when they pushed for new curriculum and materials last fall.

One teacher said she actually felt less anxiety toward the end of the last school year, because she knew that she’d have more resources going into the next. New teachers also feel less stress.

“I think as a beginning teacher, I feel I have a better grip on what I’m going to teach,” a new first-grade teacher said.

This story was originally published July 17, 2016 at 6:28 PM with the headline "Nearly a year after strike, Pasco teachers get to work on new curriculum."