Release Time For Reports

As explained earlier all classroom teachers get release time of two and a quarter hours per week for their prep. Posts like ICT get further release time of around another 45 minutes. And still the creatures work long hours. Next week is the end of Term Two, all terms are ten weeks long. Reports are issued at the end of Term Two and Term Four. Reports are due to the office today and I will write a little about them in a few days after I have ‘had the experience’! So last week, this school employed a sub teacher for a day so that the teachers could do report writing. They chose a day to suit themselves. A sub teacher gets $290 a day. We are a six teacher school (137 pupils) so the total cost to the school was $1740. The same will be repeated in Term Four. It is a lot and I have a plan to save the school the money, the next time. Now, I could tell you but I would have to shoot you!

The good news is that as I only have one and one third days teaching per week (P.E. and Library) I do not have to write reports. I worked in an equivalent sized school in Ireland from 1986 to 1998, with no release time, my own class reports to write and the rest of the teachers’ reports to read. This is bliss, or it would be if it was not 12 years since I had been a ‘working’ principal.