Akron Public Schools' parents at King Community Learning Center say their children are distraught after four of their classroom teachers were pulled from the elementary school and relocated to other buildings in the district three weeks after the school year began.
The move was disruptive for dozens of students who were just getting used to their new teachers, said Haley Starvaggi, a parent of two students at King and president of the PTA at the school.
"The students, they were given about 48 hours of notice in many cases that they were going to be assigned a different teacher or a different classroom," she said. "And for some of these students, I think that it was a pretty big adjustment, especially if they already struggle with anxiety around going to school.
The "three-week shuffle," as Superintendent Michael Robinson termed it during Monday's board of education meeting, is a necessary practice as new students can enroll or drop out of schools even after school starts. Four other teachers were also shuffled to other buildings this year, but only one teacher at each of four different buildings. The swap was necessary to even out class sizes at other schools, Robinson said.
He pledged to communicate with parents more actively in the future to let them know it's a possibility.
"We'll make sure that the messaging of that is understood by parents at the very beginning of the school year because we don't want to confuse them, but to at least apprize them that this is something that happens within our school district," Robinson said.
The school district cut 52 teachers earlier this year in cost-saving measures; however, 30 of those teachers have been hired back due to staffing needs, The Akron Beacon Journal reports.
Teacher turnover at a school can be disruptive to students' education; The loss of a teacher mid-school year can be equivalent to a loss of up to 72 days of instruction to a student, one study out of Vanderbilt University suggests.
King only lost about six students from one year to the next, so this means increased class sizes at the building, Starvaggi noted. She added teachers have made significant progress with students at the building, jumping from four to 4.5 stars out of five on the more recent annual Ohio Report Card released earlier this year.
Starvaggi and other parents hope the district works on more accurately predicting enrollment, and communicating with them, in the future, she said. She credited Robinson for hosting a meeting with concerned parents last week to explain the process.
"I would just like to highlight that we had a lot of parents who spoke out about being willing to volunteer their time in the future to help with... process improvements around predicting enrollment," she said. "And I think it would be really valuable if the district would take our parents up on that."
