Union Leader Says Leon County Teachers Are Overwhelmed And Resigning

WFSU | by Gina Jordan | September 9, 2020

Reporting a successful first week of school, the Leon County School Board met Tuesday evening to approve a budget amendment for 2019-20 and talk about the district’s response to COVID-19.

About half of the district’s students returned to the classroom while the rest chose online learning. Many teachers have students using both options.

Scott Mazur, President of the Leon Classroom Teachers Association, challenged Superintendent Rocky Hanna to address low morale among teachers.

“While this meeting was going on tonight, I received a text from a colleague of mine and it just starts off, ‘Hey, just venting, no need to follow up. I’m about to quit.’ This is a sentiment of a number of teachers that are in the district,” Mazur said. “There have been some resignations starting on Friday; some that came in today giving two weeks’ notice, and the pressures that are in place right now are overwhelming.”

Mazur said teachers are overworked as they try to handle both virtual and in-person students, taking hours of work home with them.

“We’ve surveyed the teachers. We had almost a thousand teachers respond,” Mazur said. “The number of the teachers that are in the hybrid mode are overwhelmed. 82% of them would even consider doing larger digital class sizes just because it is that difficult to do two different models at the same time and balance the students back and forth.”

Students and teachers have battled loss of internet, broken web links, and other technical issues associated with distance learning as the pandemic wears on.

A COVID-19 dashboard on the district’s homepage shows confirmed cases at each school. It’s only the daily number of positive cases, for now – not the cumulative number reported.