A Frustrated Oregon Educator
As a public educator, I take my work as an early childhood specialist seriously. This is the profession I specifically chose in order to serve children at risk and their families. I have made a lifelong commitment to enhancing the lives of children and working to ensure they are equipped to choose their own future and contribute positively to society.
I hoped that when I attended annual in-service, hosted by the ESD (Educational Service District), I would be provided training options that would enhance my professional skills and align with my daily job duties. Instead, I was informed of these upcoming offerings:
Intercultural Development Inventory
Trans Active Gender Project
Equity Collaborator Program
Equity Onboarding
Antiracist Multi Cultural Continuum
Story Exchange with Narrative
Student Voice in Action: Engaging and Empowering Students
Story Circle Training
Available teacher trainings.
None of these training are significant to my professional development needs. I will now have to find other options outside of these offerings and use the $500 that the ESD allots for professional development, to seek outside training aligned to my specialist role.
Our organization should be focusing on providing professional development within that aligns with our field of training and directly enhances our ability to serve children with special needs. Instead, it appears money and time is being spent to offer extensive DEIA trainings.
In addition to the DEIA trainings, we were all given a notebook. I opened it to begin taking notes and guess what the topic of notebook was? Antiracism. Complete with daily prompts to assist me with assumed racism. Rather than a space to take notes on the learning at hand, I’m being encouraged to work toward being an Anitracist.
Antiracist Journals
It is disappointing to see that this is how our tax dollars are being spent. It’s discouraging to see that my professional growth is no longer prioritized. I will continue to seek it on my own… but it’s time we bring back balance and focus on the job at hand, especially within publicly-funded organizations.
-A Frustrated Oregon Educator-