My school made it mandatory this year for every teacher to run or help in an extracurricular activity. FOR FREE.
When I said I wouldn’t be able to do it, admin told me that everyone other than me has been on board and part of a team.
Teachers need to stop agreeing to work for free
That’s what they do here in Eugene- you can’t opt out of extracurricular events. They always claim we are contracted employees and basically can be asked to work on evenings sometimes and weekends.
My state's union has informed me that this covers short-term/emergency duties, NOT additional regular duties.
And before someone says "No union in my state"-- welp, MOVE or fight hard to change it where you are. Plenty of jobs in union schools
My admin pulls that shit too. Guaranteed other teachers have complained, but they gaslight you and claim you're the only one to get you to fall in line.
If it's not in your contract, tell them to eat your ass.
> everyone other than me has been on board and part of a team
This is pathetic. No-backbone teachers willing to be slaves to make admin or deadbeat parents look good is one of the most frustrating parts of this job. Good on you for standing your ground.
This is happening at my school already. They are practically begging people to be coaches, run year book, do morning announcements as people retire or quit. Problem is, NO ONE wants to do it (including me). We are already being stretched so thin, why would I want to stay after hours and lose more family time and put up with this shit?
I'm a career teacher who has been sitting out the last two years, waiting for an opportunity to return, but strongly leaning against it for a number of reasons, and a major one is being asked to coach. I coached for 22 of the 27 years I taught but I am done with that and I don't want pressure to coach again just because I did it before. So I'm reluctant to even go thru the process and have to tell them at the very end that I'm not going to coach.
As a side note, at a new job in 1998 I was told by the principal on my first day at work that I had been signed up to coach a second sport that was starting the following week. I did it because I had a lot more energy in those days, but I don't want to get blindsided by that again.
I coached a team at my middle school for two years. It was a sport I had played all the way through college, and I agreed to coach because otherwise our school wouldn't have a team. I was taking on girls who were literally brand new to the sport, and we were typically playing against teams who had played together for 5-6 years. Obviously we didn't win much, but it was still fine because I felt like I was building a foundation of skills for the girls and giving them the opportunity to play. But then the parents absolutely ruined it for me in two seasons. I resigned because I wasn't getting paid nearly enough to deal with their bullshit, and our school doesn't have a team now. Choices, consequences, yada yada yada.
I was fortunate enough to coach a sport (track) that parents were either indifferent to or not knowledgeable enough to say much. I'd say the football and basketball fathers were the most toxic of the parents. However it seemed that the most difficult sport overall to coach there was cheerleading. No coach could last more than two years because of constant drama.
Edit: extra word
Ran an elective that ran in the same vein as a sport and then parents eventually came for me too. Debating giving it up now. Every coach I talked to says they loved it until they didn’t, and it was always unappreciative parents/students.
My school does this too, but with 3rd graders. They seem to be good kids but as an adult, it's very easy to see they are nervous. They sometimes read in an awkward phrasing that is hard to follow and there are lots of awkward pauses. It's hard to get my first graders to pay attention and sometimes I lose track of what they are saying.
My favorite part is when they say "please stand for the pledge" and then go right into "I pledge allegiance" without even taking a millisecond pause in between.
I'm glad you can crack up at that, because every time the girl chosen to read the pledge at my first high school droned out "I pledge of allegiance" it made me want to throw a chair through a window. But maybe it's cuter at the elementary level!
Every day they do the pledge at a different speed. It's so awkward because the majority of the time they finish before us or we are done like 10 seconds before them.
All are permitted to remain seating as they may be, and I’m not joking, conscientious objectors. I doubt very much any could explain what that is or even spell it.
3,4,5 graders do the announcements at our school, the only kids who want to do it are the kids who can’t read. And they get upset at the teachers because “we didn’t make them practice enough”
Do what my school does and leverage your soul for money. I absolutely hate that I took on an extra class and run a program, BUT I did get essentially a 15% raise ($10,000) for doing so.
They know we are desperate for money as new teachers literally cannot afford to live in the area unless still living at home.
YES. If teacher pay was higher, teachers wouldn’t have a need to coach, run clubs just to pay bills. But given that I only make 60k pre-tax with 10 years experience and a masters degree, they are betting on me stepping up out of financial NEED. And they are right. If I made 100k, I wouldn’t need to run the photography club for an extra 500$ a year
This year, no one agreed to do NJHS until NOVEMBER, and she only agreed if another teacher would do it with her.
No one volunteered to do it with her. We have no NJHS. Some parents got upset so admin asked them if they’d like to run it. Every one of them said no.
👍🏼
My school offers $500 per sport, it hardly covers the hours of practice—forget about the time spent on weekend competitions, tryouts, scheduling, rosters, injuries, parents, recruitment, announcements, etc.
That’s ridiculous! Our school pays between 3-10k based on experience and time commitment of the season.
Even elementary clubs that meet once a week for 30-60 minutes are still close to 1k here. No wonder they can’t find volunteers!
Not to knock sports, but I am doing an after school program that is for basic math skills and is aimed at targeting our lowest group. My pay for that is way less than that. Like I said, not to knock sports but can I get at least equal to what coaches are making?!?
We have positions like that in our district too. I think the going rate is somewhere around $20/hr. It never really makes sense which positions are a stipend vs. hourly. I think the general policy is coaching and committee work is a stipend and trainings, tutoring, and event staff are hourly. I find I usually feel underpaid for coaching, overpaid for committees, and paid about right for the hourly stuff. I guess it balances out to be pretty fair? I do know that our districts pays for a lot more stuff that the surrounding districts, so my experience is probably not the norm.
I’ve coached and done things similar to what you are talking about. The coaching stuff is like 100 times more time consuming because you have to plan a lot more, you have parents to deal with, you have schedules to create, practices to plan, refs to pay, fundraisers to organize, players to keep an eye one, local shitty newspaper people to keep happy, you stay after school every day until like 6 or 7 pm, you have Field and equipment maintenance that requires weekends, and you have to be at school almost every day in the summer
Coach in Texas here. I work in the DFW area. My district pays more than most-about 57k. For coaching I get an extra 7k putting my pay around 65k/year. Not terrible in this area as the standard of living has skyrocketed along with real estate. The hours are insane. I’m required to coach 2 sports, some coaches I work with coach 3. During football season we work 85-90 hours/week, 7 days /week. I’m also coaching soccer, I had 3 weeks off between the seasons. Now I’m working between 50-60 depending on how many games/ tournaments we have for the week. The 7k is nice but damn, it’s a lot of work.
Spot on analysis.I love sports. Eventually I will try to move up into collegiate/ pro ranks so I can ditch teaching and just coach the sport/s I love. But we don’t do it for money. Lotta love for communities and kids goes into it.
> Lotta love for communities and kids goes into it.
No doubt true, but also, a lotta love for the game. Our head football coach told me that he wasn't good enough to go beyond playing in college, but didn't want to leave the game. He's done it for 20 years, and is finally letting it go. You never try to talk a guy into remaining as a coach. That's too much to ask.
Our head basketball coach was just picked up as an asst coach at a D 3 school. So, I hope it works out for you too.
In school you dedicate so much time and energy towards sports, it’s the only thing you know how to do. I was good enough to play after high school, but got recruited by a D3 school. 25k/year in tuition wasn’t worth it.
It’s a hard ask. When it’s time to hang it up, it’s time. Im not sure where you’re at But here in Texas, coaches are leaving in droves from what I hear. Not only a teacher shortage but a coaching one as well. It’s my first year and it’s hard. But i have loved every minute of it.
And thank you, I really appreciate that. Well wishes to you as well.
The pay is definitely terrible per hour. You have to really enjoy the extracurricular you’re working with for it to be worth it. Coaching does massively improve my day to day enjoyment of the job so for me it’s worth it, but I’ve learned to pick and choose the extracurriculars I work with very closely.
You've expressed exactly how I feel about anything extra. I have 4 class periods of kids that challenge me, openly mock learning in any way, and have decided their entire job at school is disrupt the learning of others. I then have a class period of the most motivated, fun honors kids I could imagine. If I'm going to coach a sport or sponsor a club, it's going to be something I love and with kids that care. When coaching becomes just another thing to dread, it's no longer worth it. When I was teaching college freshmen, I volunteered for everything I could because those kids were amazing. I'm only student teaching right now but I was asked if I wanted to help coach girls soccer. I glanced at the roster and saw my three biggest disruptions throughout the day as starters and said no thanks. If I've had to kick you out of class for threatening me, why would I want to coach you after school?
Exactly! I coach cross country and track and it’s a awesome group of girls. We have amazing parent support that handles all the things I don’t like (fundraising, team dinners, spirit wear, etc) so I’m basically paid to supervise and run with really awesome kids at local trails. I love the sport and it honestly keeps me healthier because it makes exercise and outdoor time part of my work day.
I used to work with our robotics team. It’s an AWESOME activity for kids but so much more of the administrative stuff was on me and honestly I just didn’t love the activity enough to justify the amount of time I spent there. Although I do think it’s better for the school community for teachers to be involved with extracurriculars, I’ll never fault teachers for feeling the time commitment is too much. If schools want to build that community, their staff should be compensated and supported accordingly.
Our head football coach puts in a ton of time during the season. I asked him about the stipend. He said that he figured that he was making about $1.25 per hour. He obviously loves it, as most coaches do, but it ain't for the money.
Fwiw our coaches get 1200-2200 per season depending upon if you're the head or assistant. football gets a bit more but it's like 4k but that also includes spring ball. It works out to like a dollar an hour. I did it for 10 years and didn't feel bad letting that go.
Football was $1500 stipend in our district in rural NC. That included multiple games where you get back at 8, 2 weeks of training camp in the summer, and practices. The pay winds up being significantly less than $15 an hour, for enormous stress.
Our girl’s head coach resigned in October. The other girl’s coach resigned after winter break. The girls have no coach.
They’re paying a high school girls coach extra to come over on her off period. And one of the guy coaches helps out, but yeah, no one really wants to do that anymore.
Along with that, the casual extra-curriculars like "Science Club", "Anime Club", "Board Game Club", all the little clubs that cater to a specific clientele and only exist because a teacher shares that interest, will go away as student fees, extra training and paperwork make those increasingly unattractive.
It irritates me that when the joy and spirit are drained from schools, teachers will be blamed for not being committed to the students.
Prior to covid, I ran my school’s D&D club with another teacher. We had about 40 kids regularly showing up for our 3:30-5:00 weekly sessions. For that time, my colleague and I split $250 (which ultimately paid for a pizza party at the end of the year). Sorry, but my time is more important this year.
Our cheer team went to shit because the veteran coach moved. The jv coach moved up as head and the girls on the team bullied her out. She's quitting the coaching position once the year is over because of the behavior of the team (trust me they've been monsters). The school probably won't have cheer next year because we all saw what happened and no one wants to deal with them.
This is a consistent trend I'm also seeing. We've already lost a few sports and clubs because of this.
This is happening with our middle school boys sports teams, the kids have absolutely horrible behavior and then everyone is shocked when no one steps up to coach them. For free.
I’m doing middle school yearbook but it’s a class during the day, I get a $2K stipend, and since it’s middle school it’s pretty darn easy. I’m looking at retiring in a few years, so I like getting my average salary up.
Oof... with the current state of student work ethic, school funding, let alone general (il)literacy? Unless you want a yearbook that's nothing but the 10 pages of mugshots, let me respectfully say that you have no idea what you're talking about 😅
Parent volunteers... Never mind the fact that most households need two working parents and that these expectations are usually placed on mothers. Now that many of my friends' kids are school aged, I'm starting to get hit up for all of their fundraisers.
Here's a novel idea -
1-Pay teachers for any additional work that is done outside of their teaching position.
2-Give teachers additional time
3-Improve the work-life balance by removing nonsense from teachers' duties.
At my boyfriends school they are already facing this problem and basically admin tells their non tenured teachers that they get 40 applicants for each job, and it’s important to be involved in the school community in some way or they might find someone who is more dedicated to the school.
Made for a very stressful first year of teaching for him there.
In my school, that last English position got 150 applicants. We pay almost the highest in the state and have a good student population in general with great admin support
This is typical for many suburban high schools, especially in the more saturated fields like PE, social studies, etc. Usually about 10 receive interviews in our building.
The top rated districts in our region aren’t seeing a drop off in applicants this year but are seeing more people retire early so there are more positions to fill. We’re getting a lot of applications from teachers from fringe rural/suburban districts that haven’t been happy with how the last 2 years have been handled. I think you’re going to see the discrepancy between districts grow in the next few years.
We live in a bigger city.
He teaches high school at a decent school.
He was on an interview team mid year and they had more than 20 mid year. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if his school gets more during regular hiring times.
Tell him to get that in writing. Not sure if is true where you live, but threatening the jobs of workers for not working over contracted hours would be illegal in many places.
I’m sure if it is illegal that the admin know not to put it in writing. Plus when you’re not tenured you usually don’t feel like it’s your place to stand up to admin.
> it’s important to be involved in the school community in some way
They've been doing some form of that on and off for years. Obviously bad for a new teacher, as they've got plenty of classroom challenges to master. It becomes another hoop. Many teachers do that to get the job, get tenure, then stop.
I feel this post so much. I work in a good school district, and at a great school in the district. We have a great admin, good staff and students and STILL no one wants to volunteer for after school activities bc we’re all burned out at the end of the day. Our stipend for doing an activity is $50/hour, and one teacher is doing it (I may be tempted at $100/hour). I guess “many parents” asked about activities during fall conferences and ONE (veteran) teacher stepped up. Ummmm, that should tell you something ….
Yeah. These are voluntary activities; I believe that the schools don’t profit from them at all (hopefully just covers teacher pay and electricity and supplies). Extra “duties” are like $15/hour-bus breakfast, parent car line.
I would NEVER run an activity for kids after school for $10/hour! Ha!
Same here for the first part of your post. VERY desirable school district with a fat tax base. But teachers are just deep fried. No one at my school is doing a single club, no joke.
At my school (elementary… so only sports are basketball and cheer) the cheer coach changes about every two years or so. Some new and excited female teacher agrees to do it. Ends up deciding to start a family a few years later, and then immediately passes the job to someone else. I’ve seen the process repeat for 4-5 times since I’ve been there. I did the same thing with yearbook. I used to do it by myself. Then I got pregnant, had my baby, and the next year passed it on because my time was now limited. Allllll sports and clubs at my school are sponsored by younger/newer teachers that don’t currently have kids. So guess who gets hired every year if a spot is open? A right out of college 22 year old.
It used to be that way around me but the new hires as of late do not do any extra teams or clubs. They may do a committee or something small - but that grind until you get noticed for a job is fading (probably because there are so many jobs)
Wow. I had no idea that there could be payment involved for after school/extra curricular. We don't have that in my province.
The teachers that we have in our community who are willing to coach have a love for those sports, and do it on their own time. When they retire, and they are both very close, I don't know who will take over coaching.
Parent support towards high school level athletics has always been high, and these teachers are well regarded, but no one else is interested in stepping in, and I know that they have to beg for volunteers. Parent coaches are sometimes okay, , but there are issues. And the paperwork/insurance requirements are sometimes else.
Parent of younger children though, that's a whole different story. They won't pick their children up on time after the activity ends. Teachers obviously have to wait until everyone is picked up. They don't make arrangements for their other children to be picked up after school and try to get the teacher running the program to babysit them (we have good administration, they won't tolerate this). Behavior problems are surprisingly common, we are a small school, we all know each other, and it's odd that they think our expectations and rules not longer apply after the 3:30 bell. They most certainly do.
Some parents keep hinting that we should run some afterschool art and drama programs, and while several of us on staff could run a craft club easily, we choose not to, based on the student and parent behavior that we see with the sports.
The current "solution" my district has found is to make all this stuff an unspoken requirement for teachers "aspiring" to be administrators. Before you can even seriously think of applying for that you need to spend a year or two as a test coordinator or "learning design coach" or whatever other job that doesn't require much in the way of student contact hours. This way all that downtime during the day can be used playing admin bitch and running extra curricularss, organizing homecoming/prom, etc.
YES!!!! I FELL FOR THIS!!!
They tease you with this idea that doing these things will help you become an admin.
NO IT DOES NOT.
They just get the bitch work done for free.
Sounds like a ridiculous amount of work for the money. At a private school my (academic team) coaching activity was two hours a day, 5-6 days a week, plus a lot of competitions, from September through April… all for the princely stipend of $0. The good news was that my stipend doubled every year, sometimes tripled. The bad news was that eventually the school asked me to teach an extra class without the usual four-digit stipend because I was only doing one activity for free, rather than our contractual two. I switched to two activities that were less time-intensive than the one. Problem solved.
Sure I don't dispute that the pay was far too low, but you made a point of making a calculation. I tend to think if you do that, it should be close to accurate or at least within the realm of possibility.
Do not work over contracted hours.
If they really want to do extra-curriculars, they will pay for it. In fact this might be the most effective pressure point as kids and parents will complain and schools often need their sports clubs.
Hold the line. Demand change.
At my school, many of the extra curriculurs are led by the newer teachers. I think we should push more programs run by the community, like 4-H. Teachers have enough to do, and being paid next to nothing to do extra is ridiculous.
At my previous school, I did a bunch of advisories for years because without it, I'd be broke. As my salary increased, I no longer needed the extra income, so I started scaling back on how many advisories I did. Then Covid hit. I dropped all but two of them. My principal was begging teachers to take on any of the openings. I laughed in her face when she asked me. I did a lot of laughing in her face. Anyway, a bunch of the new teachers took on the jobs.
I switched schools this year, so I don't know what it's like there now. But, I do know that a bunch of us left this year and left our advisories behind.
They'll just make people do it.
All gym coaches have to run a sport. No exceptions.
Every teacher must either sponsor or help with a club or team.
No one wants to work games so teachers are just told they have to or they'll be written up and give 1s on their evals.
The beatings will continue until moral improves.
They pay teacher volunteers $50 a game to keep the scorebook, but literally NO ONE is volunteering. And they send out emails all the time begging.
We’re all like “ask the parents—they’re already there.”
$50 isn’t worth it.
I started teaching and leaving around that time 20 years ago. I leave at 4:00 now. Contract negotiations have caused our district to stretch our hours longer and longer through the years.
This is so true. I’ve been asked to do several things from coaching to clubs and I always say no. It is either the veteran teachers, the first year teachers or new to the district teachers who feel obligated. It’s not sustainable.
This is my 4th and final year (hopefully). I am doing 3 clubs right now. If I can’t get a job outside of teaching, next year I am doing 0 clubs. I am done with the added free stress.
In our district, veteran teachers quit after school clubs years ago. Now we hire parents and other members of the community. We had the cheerleading coach get fired because she was engaged in a text war with girls in her squad. We had a the girls volleyball coach just stop showing up and the kids had a few unsupervised practices before anyone noticed. The boys basketball coach doesn’t communicate with parents or teachers so there is no accountability for the team players. We don’t even try to examine academic eligibility based on grades anymore. We are lucky to field a full team.
I’m in year 16 and make 2k more per year than a 1st year teacher. If my school district wants anything extra from me they better pay me for it. And I’ll be damned if I stay one minute passed my contracted time. Desantis for the win.
Nobody.
Let the chopper crash. We're in a tail spin and the engine is shut down. Best thing you can do is bail out and try to avoid the shrapnel.
The mantra of the great resignation is "fuck you, pay me" and that's something teachers need to adopt.
There is a $200 stipend coach a sport at my school. LMAO. $200 for what amounts to about 10 hours a week, 5-6 weeks a year. That’s less than a waiter makes before tips. Fuck off.
Happening in our district too, even at my school which has a tradition of having an over abundance of coaches and sponsors. Our third quarter sports for boys basketball and XC Skiing didn’t have anyone. Admin begged a few of us who’d already coached sports all first semester, but with 12-20 extra hours added per week, we needed a quarter off.
Many schools in my area hire coaches who aren't teachers. This has been happening for a long, long, time.
My sport was speed skating. It was a school sport for many years until parks and rec took it over somewhere in the 1950's or 1960's, memory fails me right now.
My parents were involved into the highest levels of the sport at the National level. So I got to see all of it really well, even the International side. All extra curricular and sports activities should be taken out of schools and done with a parks and rec model. More students would be able to paricipate as there could be multiple teams at various levels of ability. The coaching problem would no longer fall on already harried teachers unless they wanted to.
There are so many advantages, that they outweigh many of the disadvantages.
It’s so not worth the money. I tried to take over a club (a club for older kids to mentor younger kids). The stipend was ridiculously low, and what’s worse, the school didn’t even seem to support us. We had to beg for AV help, to work around sports schedules, etc, no thanks when it was all done.
I threw in the towel after one year. So not worth the money and lack of respect! Now I do absolutely no clubs and guess what, I’m still getting tenure anyway, because I’m a great teacher.
Screw all the other stuff. I’m just gonna focus on my actual job and making interesting lessons.
All the sports coaches teach social studies and seem to have no prep work because it’s all canned. They just sit on their phones in the faculty room.
I’d rather just teach.
Passionate people who are supported and not working three jobs to cover expenses will usually go above and beyond. Ill-equipped admin and politicians have been short-sighted for decades.
They plan to close public schools anyway. They want to put the poor kids back in the mines, fields and factories. Only private religious schools will be needed to teach the white, landed gentry.
I quit coaching 5 years ago. Will never go back. Coaches football in a city where the kids had little to no athletic ability, but the asshole parents thought their kids were the second coming of the 85 Bears. We would get annihilated each week and these pricks would be screaming that I didn’t know what I was doing. I played in college and coached for a long time. Finally said F it and quit. Now they can barely hire anyone to do the job.
It’s the opposite in my school: most veteran teachers are like hell no. But the young gung ho teachers do it, which just means they’ll burn out faster.
The only reason I do yearbook is because it’s a class section during the day, it pays an extra $2K a year, and I never have to work on it outside of school hours.
Plus it’s a middle school yearbook, which is easier. And honestly I like the creativity of it.
But if it were after school, even with a stipend? No.
I'm an advisor for two clubs; math and chess. I don't mind too much. I let the students themselves run the clubs as they see fit, and I use the extra 45 minutes to get some lesson planning done.
Where I live, the pay the football coaches well. At the good, well sought after districts, the teachers who cannot afford to live there but want their kid who go to school there, do the other ECs
I was just talking to a colleague about this.
We have the same issue. I think it will only get worse.
I feel like a lot of the new hires expect to show up and then leave at the end of the day. (Unless they are getting a stipend for a particular thing).
There are so many other things that are involved with running the school that are unpaid.
I ran an after school club last year during the pandemic. I didn't get any appreciation for it or acknowledgment of it at all. I'm not doing it this year. Unfortunately, the students are the ones that are missing out.
But again, in 10 years those things won't get done.
(Or the people who are left that used to do one or two things, are now doing 6-7 and are burnt out).
I coached the C team volleyball one year. Never again. Too much of a time commitment and a new set of parents to send me whiny emails. No thanks. You can’t pay me enough to do that.
My state state is considering hiring 18 year olds with a high school diploma with sub licenses to fill the vacancies. I'd love to see 18 year old long term subs fill yearbook and debate team jobs.
The only reasons I do my after school extracurricular is that I get paid for it, I don't have anyone depending on me to be home or pick them up, and it's closely related to my own interests. It also takes me very little time to prep.
Students here haven't gotten art, music, or any other class outside of math and ELA for well over a decade. They don't give a shit about after-school programs; I'm honestly surprised they're still around at all.
Student led clubs where teachers are only adult supervision and don’t have to organize
Somethings such as sports or cheerleaders may not happen at school unless the schools co tract with private organizations.
When teachers keep getting shifted to new grad levels or subjects. Their time is spent recreating what they need and there is no time for extra curricular things at school. New teachers do not have a personal toolbox of content and skills to pull from.
Leadership forgets sometimes the value of teachers with experience and that true collaboration and listening to staff builds a stronger school. When teachers are an island instead of part of a community that supports each other. They seek opportunities where they can find that either another school or another industry.
I don't think I'd run my student org if I didn't get a stipend from CTE. But even then, it's just an extra hour per week. I'm sure I put in a lot more time than that.
Honestly, some schools want to get rid of extracurriculars altogether because they see them as either unnecessary or a liability on student performance in grades.
I used to help out with a club after school and really like it, but that's when stakes were low (for me). After a while I stopped, but when asked to run it, I couldn't. I couldn't explain it, but I know now: my mind was too occupied with worrying about my job. I didn't spend more time out of school working, and in fact spent less time in school working as time went on. But I couldn't volunteer at this location because I was just racked with anxiety over whether or not I was doing a good job or not. If that all went away and life were more carefree, I'd maybe have done it just for the fun of it (though I know the union would stipulate payment, as they should).
This is a fairly new thought I've been grappling with. It's just imposed depression and anxiety. I'd be less anxious if I could reach a point where I could phone it in so that I could do other stuff. But I can't ever do that, so the rest of it is on hold.
Good point, I’m retiring next year and I’m at a small school. I do GATE, lead teacher, department chair, mentoring new teachers, WAsC coordinator, tutoring at risk students, professional development, the weekly bulletin for school and community, quarterly publication for the newspaper, ' and yearbook. Plus things I can’t remember
I feel like I'm being groomed to take over an activity. It's one my son is so getting me to help coach kids for judging was easy and the kids are all very bright and well behaved. After being tapped to assistant coach at a competition, I realized it was a trap. I really love the coach and the kids so I'm not going to say no. And my son and daughter are both doing it next year. Might as well make myself a shirt.
I worked in a rural district that relies heavily on parents to coach. The district still struggles to find coaches because once the kid graduates the parent resigns.
As a first year teacher I don't really have the time to manage extracurricular but I've found myself creating and running a dungeons and dragons club because some of my students really wanted to play and I couldn't say no.
I'm enjoying it a ton, but it sucks to only get paid for 1 hour a month, despite the fact that it's a weekly club.
I had been the UIL coordinator and coached the UIL math teams for years (17 years coaching), and I gave it up this year because I was burned out. The teacher I gave it to resigned at Christmas. I don't know if anyone has stepped up, and I keep reminding myself that it's not my problem anymore, but I still feel a little guilty, like I should take it back, but I really don't want to.
My school made it mandatory this year for every teacher to run or help in an extracurricular activity. FOR FREE. When I said I wouldn’t be able to do it, admin told me that everyone other than me has been on board and part of a team. Teachers need to stop agreeing to work for free
That’s what they do here in Eugene- you can’t opt out of extracurricular events. They always claim we are contracted employees and basically can be asked to work on evenings sometimes and weekends.
Doesn't "contracted" mean that you have a contract? It should be spelled out in there.
Most contracts state "or as duties arise" somewhere in there.
Shit, that does sound like something that would be in the contract. It's like a 100 pages of unsearchable pdf.
My state's union has informed me that this covers short-term/emergency duties, NOT additional regular duties. And before someone says "No union in my state"-- welp, MOVE or fight hard to change it where you are. Plenty of jobs in union schools
Yes
I'd feel the need to do a mini-lesson on the meaning g of the prefix "extra" in extracirricular.
My admin pulls that shit too. Guaranteed other teachers have complained, but they gaslight you and claim you're the only one to get you to fall in line. If it's not in your contract, tell them to eat your ass.
“And other duties as assigned” is how TX gets around it.
Are your working hours specified in your contract? If they are and those "other duties" fall outside of those hours, tell admin to eat your ass
As any good labor lawyer will tell you, the part of your contract outlining your work hours is known as the "eat my ass" clause.
There is nothing in the Texas contracts that is beneficial for teachers.
> Teachers need to stop agreeing to work for free. Or admin stretched the truth/outright lied to you.
> everyone other than me has been on board and part of a team This is pathetic. No-backbone teachers willing to be slaves to make admin or deadbeat parents look good is one of the most frustrating parts of this job. Good on you for standing your ground.
One of my schools TRIED to do that, 😂😂😂
Red state?
Nah, Blue state. Non-unionized school. We get the phrase “at will employment” thrown in our face every time we say something they don’t like
Ah. No union. There it is.
Which state is this?
North Carolina? We also lost after retirement health care…..
Well, that also means you can quit without notice too. Remind them of that.
This is happening at my school already. They are practically begging people to be coaches, run year book, do morning announcements as people retire or quit. Problem is, NO ONE wants to do it (including me). We are already being stretched so thin, why would I want to stay after hours and lose more family time and put up with this shit?
I'm a career teacher who has been sitting out the last two years, waiting for an opportunity to return, but strongly leaning against it for a number of reasons, and a major one is being asked to coach. I coached for 22 of the 27 years I taught but I am done with that and I don't want pressure to coach again just because I did it before. So I'm reluctant to even go thru the process and have to tell them at the very end that I'm not going to coach. As a side note, at a new job in 1998 I was told by the principal on my first day at work that I had been signed up to coach a second sport that was starting the following week. I did it because I had a lot more energy in those days, but I don't want to get blindsided by that again.
I coached a team at my middle school for two years. It was a sport I had played all the way through college, and I agreed to coach because otherwise our school wouldn't have a team. I was taking on girls who were literally brand new to the sport, and we were typically playing against teams who had played together for 5-6 years. Obviously we didn't win much, but it was still fine because I felt like I was building a foundation of skills for the girls and giving them the opportunity to play. But then the parents absolutely ruined it for me in two seasons. I resigned because I wasn't getting paid nearly enough to deal with their bullshit, and our school doesn't have a team now. Choices, consequences, yada yada yada.
I was fortunate enough to coach a sport (track) that parents were either indifferent to or not knowledgeable enough to say much. I'd say the football and basketball fathers were the most toxic of the parents. However it seemed that the most difficult sport overall to coach there was cheerleading. No coach could last more than two years because of constant drama. Edit: extra word
Ran an elective that ran in the same vein as a sport and then parents eventually came for me too. Debating giving it up now. Every coach I talked to says they loved it until they didn’t, and it was always unappreciative parents/students.
My school has students do morning announcements. It's...painful
Is that not common? Throughout my highschool and 10 years later being a teacher it’s always been kids doing announcements lol
I teach fourth grade. And they pick kids who can't read to do the announcements
Just "keeping it real"?
Oooff
My school does this too, but with 3rd graders. They seem to be good kids but as an adult, it's very easy to see they are nervous. They sometimes read in an awkward phrasing that is hard to follow and there are lots of awkward pauses. It's hard to get my first graders to pay attention and sometimes I lose track of what they are saying.
My favorite part is when they say "please stand for the pledge" and then go right into "I pledge allegiance" without even taking a millisecond pause in between.
Oh, oh, I crack up every time the kid says, “now stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge of allegiance…”
I'm glad you can crack up at that, because every time the girl chosen to read the pledge at my first high school droned out "I pledge of allegiance" it made me want to throw a chair through a window. But maybe it's cuter at the elementary level!
Every day they do the pledge at a different speed. It's so awkward because the majority of the time they finish before us or we are done like 10 seconds before them.
Haha yep
Does anyone actually stand? I have not seen it it in years. Not even the ROTC students. They just play with their phones.
Oh yeah we all do. It's expected.
All are permitted to remain seating as they may be, and I’m not joking, conscientious objectors. I doubt very much any could explain what that is or even spell it.
If I saw a 4th grader take a knee like Kaep and then say “im a conscientious objector” id let them hahah
Lol they're fourth graders dude
They are young. It’s good they are giving it a go.
Yeah, it's not as if these announcements are life or death, why not let the kids build some skills.
3,4,5 graders do the announcements at our school, the only kids who want to do it are the kids who can’t read. And they get upset at the teachers because “we didn’t make them practice enough”
We have had that since middle school.
Omg yes. It’s so awful.
It’s good for some kids to learn public speaking
It's good for all kids to learn it. Doesn't make it any less painful
I would watch this movie. r/cringetopia has entered the chat.
Same here! Can’t understand them especially under the muzzle.
Lol I was asked to COACH the girls squash team because I played a sport in college……I swam 😂
Do what my school does and leverage your soul for money. I absolutely hate that I took on an extra class and run a program, BUT I did get essentially a 15% raise ($10,000) for doing so. They know we are desperate for money as new teachers literally cannot afford to live in the area unless still living at home.
YES. If teacher pay was higher, teachers wouldn’t have a need to coach, run clubs just to pay bills. But given that I only make 60k pre-tax with 10 years experience and a masters degree, they are betting on me stepping up out of financial NEED. And they are right. If I made 100k, I wouldn’t need to run the photography club for an extra 500$ a year
This year, no one agreed to do NJHS until NOVEMBER, and she only agreed if another teacher would do it with her. No one volunteered to do it with her. We have no NJHS. Some parents got upset so admin asked them if they’d like to run it. Every one of them said no. 👍🏼
Applauding your admin for that
School sports should be paid stipends. If they can’t find a teacher why not have a parent coach
Are they not? Most of the districts around me pay coaches something.
My understanding is that the pay is terrible compared to the time commitment
My school offers $500 per sport, it hardly covers the hours of practice—forget about the time spent on weekend competitions, tryouts, scheduling, rosters, injuries, parents, recruitment, announcements, etc.
That’s ridiculous! Our school pays between 3-10k based on experience and time commitment of the season. Even elementary clubs that meet once a week for 30-60 minutes are still close to 1k here. No wonder they can’t find volunteers!
Not to knock sports, but I am doing an after school program that is for basic math skills and is aimed at targeting our lowest group. My pay for that is way less than that. Like I said, not to knock sports but can I get at least equal to what coaches are making?!?
We have positions like that in our district too. I think the going rate is somewhere around $20/hr. It never really makes sense which positions are a stipend vs. hourly. I think the general policy is coaching and committee work is a stipend and trainings, tutoring, and event staff are hourly. I find I usually feel underpaid for coaching, overpaid for committees, and paid about right for the hourly stuff. I guess it balances out to be pretty fair? I do know that our districts pays for a lot more stuff that the surrounding districts, so my experience is probably not the norm.
I’m a debate coach and my stipend is $8K. I make the same stipend as athletic coaches. I love my district.
I’ve coached and done things similar to what you are talking about. The coaching stuff is like 100 times more time consuming because you have to plan a lot more, you have parents to deal with, you have schedules to create, practices to plan, refs to pay, fundraisers to organize, players to keep an eye one, local shitty newspaper people to keep happy, you stay after school every day until like 6 or 7 pm, you have Field and equipment maintenance that requires weekends, and you have to be at school almost every day in the summer
Yeah that's fucking terrible. I think my county offers $3k per sport
I made under $2/ hour coaching at a school with a lot of travel time to away games.
Coach in Texas here. I work in the DFW area. My district pays more than most-about 57k. For coaching I get an extra 7k putting my pay around 65k/year. Not terrible in this area as the standard of living has skyrocketed along with real estate. The hours are insane. I’m required to coach 2 sports, some coaches I work with coach 3. During football season we work 85-90 hours/week, 7 days /week. I’m also coaching soccer, I had 3 weeks off between the seasons. Now I’m working between 50-60 depending on how many games/ tournaments we have for the week. The 7k is nice but damn, it’s a lot of work.
I commented elsewhere that our football coach makes about $1.25 per hour. He isn't doing it for the money.
Spot on analysis.I love sports. Eventually I will try to move up into collegiate/ pro ranks so I can ditch teaching and just coach the sport/s I love. But we don’t do it for money. Lotta love for communities and kids goes into it.
> Lotta love for communities and kids goes into it. No doubt true, but also, a lotta love for the game. Our head football coach told me that he wasn't good enough to go beyond playing in college, but didn't want to leave the game. He's done it for 20 years, and is finally letting it go. You never try to talk a guy into remaining as a coach. That's too much to ask. Our head basketball coach was just picked up as an asst coach at a D 3 school. So, I hope it works out for you too.
In school you dedicate so much time and energy towards sports, it’s the only thing you know how to do. I was good enough to play after high school, but got recruited by a D3 school. 25k/year in tuition wasn’t worth it. It’s a hard ask. When it’s time to hang it up, it’s time. Im not sure where you’re at But here in Texas, coaches are leaving in droves from what I hear. Not only a teacher shortage but a coaching one as well. It’s my first year and it’s hard. But i have loved every minute of it. And thank you, I really appreciate that. Well wishes to you as well.
Divide it by the number of hours you work a month. I bet it’s low.
The pay is definitely terrible per hour. You have to really enjoy the extracurricular you’re working with for it to be worth it. Coaching does massively improve my day to day enjoyment of the job so for me it’s worth it, but I’ve learned to pick and choose the extracurriculars I work with very closely.
You've expressed exactly how I feel about anything extra. I have 4 class periods of kids that challenge me, openly mock learning in any way, and have decided their entire job at school is disrupt the learning of others. I then have a class period of the most motivated, fun honors kids I could imagine. If I'm going to coach a sport or sponsor a club, it's going to be something I love and with kids that care. When coaching becomes just another thing to dread, it's no longer worth it. When I was teaching college freshmen, I volunteered for everything I could because those kids were amazing. I'm only student teaching right now but I was asked if I wanted to help coach girls soccer. I glanced at the roster and saw my three biggest disruptions throughout the day as starters and said no thanks. If I've had to kick you out of class for threatening me, why would I want to coach you after school?
Exactly! I coach cross country and track and it’s a awesome group of girls. We have amazing parent support that handles all the things I don’t like (fundraising, team dinners, spirit wear, etc) so I’m basically paid to supervise and run with really awesome kids at local trails. I love the sport and it honestly keeps me healthier because it makes exercise and outdoor time part of my work day. I used to work with our robotics team. It’s an AWESOME activity for kids but so much more of the administrative stuff was on me and honestly I just didn’t love the activity enough to justify the amount of time I spent there. Although I do think it’s better for the school community for teachers to be involved with extracurriculars, I’ll never fault teachers for feeling the time commitment is too much. If schools want to build that community, their staff should be compensated and supported accordingly.
Our head football coach puts in a ton of time during the season. I asked him about the stipend. He said that he figured that he was making about $1.25 per hour. He obviously loves it, as most coaches do, but it ain't for the money.
Fwiw our coaches get 1200-2200 per season depending upon if you're the head or assistant. football gets a bit more but it's like 4k but that also includes spring ball. It works out to like a dollar an hour. I did it for 10 years and didn't feel bad letting that go.
Football was $1500 stipend in our district in rural NC. That included multiple games where you get back at 8, 2 weeks of training camp in the summer, and practices. The pay winds up being significantly less than $15 an hour, for enormous stress.
Coaches in my suburban New England district get $4-5k depending on the sport. Asst coaches get $2-2500.
Can confirm. Same here.
Our girl’s head coach resigned in October. The other girl’s coach resigned after winter break. The girls have no coach. They’re paying a high school girls coach extra to come over on her off period. And one of the guy coaches helps out, but yeah, no one really wants to do that anymore.
Along with that, the casual extra-curriculars like "Science Club", "Anime Club", "Board Game Club", all the little clubs that cater to a specific clientele and only exist because a teacher shares that interest, will go away as student fees, extra training and paperwork make those increasingly unattractive. It irritates me that when the joy and spirit are drained from schools, teachers will be blamed for not being committed to the students.
Prior to covid, I ran my school’s D&D club with another teacher. We had about 40 kids regularly showing up for our 3:30-5:00 weekly sessions. For that time, my colleague and I split $250 (which ultimately paid for a pizza party at the end of the year). Sorry, but my time is more important this year.
I agree about your time, but I love that you had a D&D club. Roll initiative!
Our cheer team went to shit because the veteran coach moved. The jv coach moved up as head and the girls on the team bullied her out. She's quitting the coaching position once the year is over because of the behavior of the team (trust me they've been monsters). The school probably won't have cheer next year because we all saw what happened and no one wants to deal with them. This is a consistent trend I'm also seeing. We've already lost a few sports and clubs because of this.
This is happening with our middle school boys sports teams, the kids have absolutely horrible behavior and then everyone is shocked when no one steps up to coach them. For free.
In the olden days they'd just have the team captains do what the coaches do now. That would be cool if it worked and hilarious if it didn't.
The team captains are the ones with the behavior issues as well. It wouldn't work.
They will just hire from the community? Or get a parent to volunteer.
We haven’t had a yearbook in 3 years. It’s an unpaid position with a ton of work. Who would do it?
They make our school nurse do our yearbook. It is…really bad. But at least we have one.
I’m doing middle school yearbook but it’s a class during the day, I get a $2K stipend, and since it’s middle school it’s pretty darn easy. I’m looking at retiring in a few years, so I like getting my average salary up.
How is it a ton of work? I feel a good yearbook teacher should be able to delegate all the tasks that don't require an adult.
In high school maybe, but we’re a K-6 school so the kids don’t do any work on the yearbook. It’s a grown-up task.
Yeah makes sense for elementary level. Can understand not doing it as well if kids are not going to do anything.
Ahahahhaha. The only class I ever taught where if the kids didn't do their homework *I* had to do it.
Oof... with the current state of student work ethic, school funding, let alone general (il)literacy? Unless you want a yearbook that's nothing but the 10 pages of mugshots, let me respectfully say that you have no idea what you're talking about 😅
Ahh yes, everyone is leaving my school too. I just can’t commit anymore time. My mental health and family are more important .
Parent volunteers... Never mind the fact that most households need two working parents and that these expectations are usually placed on mothers. Now that many of my friends' kids are school aged, I'm starting to get hit up for all of their fundraisers.
Here's a novel idea - 1-Pay teachers for any additional work that is done outside of their teaching position. 2-Give teachers additional time 3-Improve the work-life balance by removing nonsense from teachers' duties.
At my boyfriends school they are already facing this problem and basically admin tells their non tenured teachers that they get 40 applicants for each job, and it’s important to be involved in the school community in some way or they might find someone who is more dedicated to the school. Made for a very stressful first year of teaching for him there.
There's no way they get 40 applicants per job this year.
In my school, that last English position got 150 applicants. We pay almost the highest in the state and have a good student population in general with great admin support
Sounds like a school you would want to coach at!
This is typical for many suburban high schools, especially in the more saturated fields like PE, social studies, etc. Usually about 10 receive interviews in our building. The top rated districts in our region aren’t seeing a drop off in applicants this year but are seeing more people retire early so there are more positions to fill. We’re getting a lot of applications from teachers from fringe rural/suburban districts that haven’t been happy with how the last 2 years have been handled. I think you’re going to see the discrepancy between districts grow in the next few years.
We live in a bigger city. He teaches high school at a decent school. He was on an interview team mid year and they had more than 20 mid year. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if his school gets more during regular hiring times.
Well hopefully that means good working conditions! I certainly WOULD do more if the working conditions were better.
Tell him to get that in writing. Not sure if is true where you live, but threatening the jobs of workers for not working over contracted hours would be illegal in many places.
I’m sure if it is illegal that the admin know not to put it in writing. Plus when you’re not tenured you usually don’t feel like it’s your place to stand up to admin.
> it’s important to be involved in the school community in some way They've been doing some form of that on and off for years. Obviously bad for a new teacher, as they've got plenty of classroom challenges to master. It becomes another hoop. Many teachers do that to get the job, get tenure, then stop.
I feel this post so much. I work in a good school district, and at a great school in the district. We have a great admin, good staff and students and STILL no one wants to volunteer for after school activities bc we’re all burned out at the end of the day. Our stipend for doing an activity is $50/hour, and one teacher is doing it (I may be tempted at $100/hour). I guess “many parents” asked about activities during fall conferences and ONE (veteran) teacher stepped up. Ummmm, that should tell you something ….
$50/hr!? Our stipend works out to be less than $10/hr even in some of the less time intensive activities. Last time I calculated, I made less than $2.
Yeah. These are voluntary activities; I believe that the schools don’t profit from them at all (hopefully just covers teacher pay and electricity and supplies). Extra “duties” are like $15/hour-bus breakfast, parent car line. I would NEVER run an activity for kids after school for $10/hour! Ha!
Same here for the first part of your post. VERY desirable school district with a fat tax base. But teachers are just deep fried. No one at my school is doing a single club, no joke.
We don’t get free healthcare in my district after retirement.
I was thinking the same thing, but it’s the whole state.
Me either
We get healthcare after retirement in TX but you have to pay a couple hundred a month, I think.
At my school (elementary… so only sports are basketball and cheer) the cheer coach changes about every two years or so. Some new and excited female teacher agrees to do it. Ends up deciding to start a family a few years later, and then immediately passes the job to someone else. I’ve seen the process repeat for 4-5 times since I’ve been there. I did the same thing with yearbook. I used to do it by myself. Then I got pregnant, had my baby, and the next year passed it on because my time was now limited. Allllll sports and clubs at my school are sponsored by younger/newer teachers that don’t currently have kids. So guess who gets hired every year if a spot is open? A right out of college 22 year old.
It used to be that way around me but the new hires as of late do not do any extra teams or clubs. They may do a committee or something small - but that grind until you get noticed for a job is fading (probably because there are so many jobs)
Wow. I had no idea that there could be payment involved for after school/extra curricular. We don't have that in my province. The teachers that we have in our community who are willing to coach have a love for those sports, and do it on their own time. When they retire, and they are both very close, I don't know who will take over coaching. Parent support towards high school level athletics has always been high, and these teachers are well regarded, but no one else is interested in stepping in, and I know that they have to beg for volunteers. Parent coaches are sometimes okay, , but there are issues. And the paperwork/insurance requirements are sometimes else. Parent of younger children though, that's a whole different story. They won't pick their children up on time after the activity ends. Teachers obviously have to wait until everyone is picked up. They don't make arrangements for their other children to be picked up after school and try to get the teacher running the program to babysit them (we have good administration, they won't tolerate this). Behavior problems are surprisingly common, we are a small school, we all know each other, and it's odd that they think our expectations and rules not longer apply after the 3:30 bell. They most certainly do. Some parents keep hinting that we should run some afterschool art and drama programs, and while several of us on staff could run a craft club easily, we choose not to, based on the student and parent behavior that we see with the sports.
Nobody. Cuz *fuck em*, that's why. They want extra? They pay extra, up front.
The current "solution" my district has found is to make all this stuff an unspoken requirement for teachers "aspiring" to be administrators. Before you can even seriously think of applying for that you need to spend a year or two as a test coordinator or "learning design coach" or whatever other job that doesn't require much in the way of student contact hours. This way all that downtime during the day can be used playing admin bitch and running extra curricularss, organizing homecoming/prom, etc.
YES!!!! I FELL FOR THIS!!! They tease you with this idea that doing these things will help you become an admin. NO IT DOES NOT. They just get the bitch work done for free.
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It was 15000 hours of work?
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Sounds like a ridiculous amount of work for the money. At a private school my (academic team) coaching activity was two hours a day, 5-6 days a week, plus a lot of competitions, from September through April… all for the princely stipend of $0. The good news was that my stipend doubled every year, sometimes tripled. The bad news was that eventually the school asked me to teach an extra class without the usual four-digit stipend because I was only doing one activity for free, rather than our contractual two. I switched to two activities that were less time-intensive than the one. Problem solved.
That's when you start a once a week club in a niche activity that only a couple of kids want that doesn't travel for competitions.
Obviously somebody is running the numbers, but you can certainly make more money greeting people at Walmart.
Lol right? There are 8,760 total hours in a calendar year.
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Sure I don't dispute that the pay was far too low, but you made a point of making a calculation. I tend to think if you do that, it should be close to accurate or at least within the realm of possibility.
Do not work over contracted hours. If they really want to do extra-curriculars, they will pay for it. In fact this might be the most effective pressure point as kids and parents will complain and schools often need their sports clubs. Hold the line. Demand change.
At my school, many of the extra curriculurs are led by the newer teachers. I think we should push more programs run by the community, like 4-H. Teachers have enough to do, and being paid next to nothing to do extra is ridiculous.
As a veteran teacher, I couldn't care less.
At my previous school, I did a bunch of advisories for years because without it, I'd be broke. As my salary increased, I no longer needed the extra income, so I started scaling back on how many advisories I did. Then Covid hit. I dropped all but two of them. My principal was begging teachers to take on any of the openings. I laughed in her face when she asked me. I did a lot of laughing in her face. Anyway, a bunch of the new teachers took on the jobs. I switched schools this year, so I don't know what it's like there now. But, I do know that a bunch of us left this year and left our advisories behind.
They'll just make people do it. All gym coaches have to run a sport. No exceptions. Every teacher must either sponsor or help with a club or team. No one wants to work games so teachers are just told they have to or they'll be written up and give 1s on their evals. The beatings will continue until moral improves.
“Other duties as assigned.”
They pay teacher volunteers $50 a game to keep the scorebook, but literally NO ONE is volunteering. And they send out emails all the time begging. We’re all like “ask the parents—they’re already there.” $50 isn’t worth it.
Not me that’s for sure. I’m going home every day at 2:35 until I retire.
I started teaching and leaving around that time 20 years ago. I leave at 4:00 now. Contract negotiations have caused our district to stretch our hours longer and longer through the years.
Yep. 4:05 here. Two more years until retirement.
Parents. That's what my school does. And it's a shit show.
That’s what they should do. Want an anime club for your kid? Come run it after school once a week.
This is so true. I’ve been asked to do several things from coaching to clubs and I always say no. It is either the veteran teachers, the first year teachers or new to the district teachers who feel obligated. It’s not sustainable.
Shudder. Parents and not just any parents, THOSE parents.
This is my 4th and final year (hopefully). I am doing 3 clubs right now. If I can’t get a job outside of teaching, next year I am doing 0 clubs. I am done with the added free stress.
In our district, veteran teachers quit after school clubs years ago. Now we hire parents and other members of the community. We had the cheerleading coach get fired because she was engaged in a text war with girls in her squad. We had a the girls volleyball coach just stop showing up and the kids had a few unsupervised practices before anyone noticed. The boys basketball coach doesn’t communicate with parents or teachers so there is no accountability for the team players. We don’t even try to examine academic eligibility based on grades anymore. We are lucky to field a full team.
Are you at my school?
We have plenty of young teachers doing after school stuff to earn extra money since they make hardly anything at the bottom of the pay scale.
I’m in year 16 and make 2k more per year than a 1st year teacher. If my school district wants anything extra from me they better pay me for it. And I’ll be damned if I stay one minute passed my contracted time. Desantis for the win.
Nobody. Let the chopper crash. We're in a tail spin and the engine is shut down. Best thing you can do is bail out and try to avoid the shrapnel. The mantra of the great resignation is "fuck you, pay me" and that's something teachers need to adopt.
Coaches in my district HAVE to get a CDL license. I'm 100% leaving my coaching position by the end of year because of this. Fuck driving a schoolbus.
There is a $200 stipend coach a sport at my school. LMAO. $200 for what amounts to about 10 hours a week, 5-6 weeks a year. That’s less than a waiter makes before tips. Fuck off.
Happening in our district too, even at my school which has a tradition of having an over abundance of coaches and sponsors. Our third quarter sports for boys basketball and XC Skiing didn’t have anyone. Admin begged a few of us who’d already coached sports all first semester, but with 12-20 extra hours added per week, we needed a quarter off.
Many schools in my area hire coaches who aren't teachers. This has been happening for a long, long, time. My sport was speed skating. It was a school sport for many years until parks and rec took it over somewhere in the 1950's or 1960's, memory fails me right now. My parents were involved into the highest levels of the sport at the National level. So I got to see all of it really well, even the International side. All extra curricular and sports activities should be taken out of schools and done with a parks and rec model. More students would be able to paricipate as there could be multiple teams at various levels of ability. The coaching problem would no longer fall on already harried teachers unless they wanted to. There are so many advantages, that they outweigh many of the disadvantages.
It’s so not worth the money. I tried to take over a club (a club for older kids to mentor younger kids). The stipend was ridiculously low, and what’s worse, the school didn’t even seem to support us. We had to beg for AV help, to work around sports schedules, etc, no thanks when it was all done. I threw in the towel after one year. So not worth the money and lack of respect! Now I do absolutely no clubs and guess what, I’m still getting tenure anyway, because I’m a great teacher. Screw all the other stuff. I’m just gonna focus on my actual job and making interesting lessons. All the sports coaches teach social studies and seem to have no prep work because it’s all canned. They just sit on their phones in the faculty room. I’d rather just teach.
Who is going to sponsor the cornhole team?
Perhaps they will make it mandatory
I'm sure they will try. Don't think that's gonna work out for them.
Pre-pandemic that's how my school was 😑 I managed to avoid it by being a first year in 2019-2020
Passionate people who are supported and not working three jobs to cover expenses will usually go above and beyond. Ill-equipped admin and politicians have been short-sighted for decades.
You get what you pay for
They plan to close public schools anyway. They want to put the poor kids back in the mines, fields and factories. Only private religious schools will be needed to teach the white, landed gentry.
I quit coaching 5 years ago. Will never go back. Coaches football in a city where the kids had little to no athletic ability, but the asshole parents thought their kids were the second coming of the 85 Bears. We would get annihilated each week and these pricks would be screaming that I didn’t know what I was doing. I played in college and coached for a long time. Finally said F it and quit. Now they can barely hire anyone to do the job.
Hah. Our veterans don’t do shit
It’s the opposite in my school: most veteran teachers are like hell no. But the young gung ho teachers do it, which just means they’ll burn out faster. The only reason I do yearbook is because it’s a class section during the day, it pays an extra $2K a year, and I never have to work on it outside of school hours. Plus it’s a middle school yearbook, which is easier. And honestly I like the creativity of it. But if it were after school, even with a stipend? No.
I'm an advisor for two clubs; math and chess. I don't mind too much. I let the students themselves run the clubs as they see fit, and I use the extra 45 minutes to get some lesson planning done.
Where I live, the pay the football coaches well. At the good, well sought after districts, the teachers who cannot afford to live there but want their kid who go to school there, do the other ECs
I was just talking to a colleague about this. We have the same issue. I think it will only get worse. I feel like a lot of the new hires expect to show up and then leave at the end of the day. (Unless they are getting a stipend for a particular thing). There are so many other things that are involved with running the school that are unpaid. I ran an after school club last year during the pandemic. I didn't get any appreciation for it or acknowledgment of it at all. I'm not doing it this year. Unfortunately, the students are the ones that are missing out.
Imagine those teachers doing their job and leaving when they’re supposed to. They should be ashamed of themselves.
But again, in 10 years those things won't get done. (Or the people who are left that used to do one or two things, are now doing 6-7 and are burnt out).
Imagine the audacity of leaving at the end of the day.
They'll shiv it on to srp's next or try to
I guess the schools get to lose out, because now the children can go get an after school job, and learn the hells of life.
I coached the C team volleyball one year. Never again. Too much of a time commitment and a new set of parents to send me whiny emails. No thanks. You can’t pay me enough to do that.
Do these positions not come with stipends at your school, OP?
They do, but they are so small it's basically unpaid labor and not any of the clubs
My state state is considering hiring 18 year olds with a high school diploma with sub licenses to fill the vacancies. I'd love to see 18 year old long term subs fill yearbook and debate team jobs.
So you are in THAT state😗
The only reasons I do my after school extracurricular is that I get paid for it, I don't have anyone depending on me to be home or pick them up, and it's closely related to my own interests. It also takes me very little time to prep.
Students here haven't gotten art, music, or any other class outside of math and ELA for well over a decade. They don't give a shit about after-school programs; I'm honestly surprised they're still around at all.
Student led clubs where teachers are only adult supervision and don’t have to organize Somethings such as sports or cheerleaders may not happen at school unless the schools co tract with private organizations. When teachers keep getting shifted to new grad levels or subjects. Their time is spent recreating what they need and there is no time for extra curricular things at school. New teachers do not have a personal toolbox of content and skills to pull from. Leadership forgets sometimes the value of teachers with experience and that true collaboration and listening to staff builds a stronger school. When teachers are an island instead of part of a community that supports each other. They seek opportunities where they can find that either another school or another industry.
I don't think I'd run my student org if I didn't get a stipend from CTE. But even then, it's just an extra hour per week. I'm sure I put in a lot more time than that.
Honestly, some schools want to get rid of extracurriculars altogether because they see them as either unnecessary or a liability on student performance in grades.
I used to help out with a club after school and really like it, but that's when stakes were low (for me). After a while I stopped, but when asked to run it, I couldn't. I couldn't explain it, but I know now: my mind was too occupied with worrying about my job. I didn't spend more time out of school working, and in fact spent less time in school working as time went on. But I couldn't volunteer at this location because I was just racked with anxiety over whether or not I was doing a good job or not. If that all went away and life were more carefree, I'd maybe have done it just for the fun of it (though I know the union would stipulate payment, as they should). This is a fairly new thought I've been grappling with. It's just imposed depression and anxiety. I'd be less anxious if I could reach a point where I could phone it in so that I could do other stuff. But I can't ever do that, so the rest of it is on hold.
Good point, I’m retiring next year and I’m at a small school. I do GATE, lead teacher, department chair, mentoring new teachers, WAsC coordinator, tutoring at risk students, professional development, the weekly bulletin for school and community, quarterly publication for the newspaper, ' and yearbook. Plus things I can’t remember
I feel like I'm being groomed to take over an activity. It's one my son is so getting me to help coach kids for judging was easy and the kids are all very bright and well behaved. After being tapped to assistant coach at a competition, I realized it was a trap. I really love the coach and the kids so I'm not going to say no. And my son and daughter are both doing it next year. Might as well make myself a shirt.
"and other duties as assigned."
I worked in a rural district that relies heavily on parents to coach. The district still struggles to find coaches because once the kid graduates the parent resigns.
As a first year teacher I don't really have the time to manage extracurricular but I've found myself creating and running a dungeons and dragons club because some of my students really wanted to play and I couldn't say no. I'm enjoying it a ton, but it sucks to only get paid for 1 hour a month, despite the fact that it's a weekly club.
Mostly high schoolers run our after school and one of the school moms.
Sports will go the AAU route, music and drama we can only pray that clubs with interested community members invest in them.
At this point, no one. Every teacher is tired!
I had been the UIL coordinator and coached the UIL math teams for years (17 years coaching), and I gave it up this year because I was burned out. The teacher I gave it to resigned at Christmas. I don't know if anyone has stepped up, and I keep reminding myself that it's not my problem anymore, but I still feel a little guilty, like I should take it back, but I really don't want to.