Editor’s Note: This is the second in a two-part series on the Santa Maria-Bonita School District’s decision to not allow teachers to teach full novels in their classes. The first part, “For the love of reading,” is in our May 13 issue.
In the late afternoon on May 12, Santa Maria-Bonita School District teachers began to line the street outside of the district office. The sidewalk became a sea of blue as more people arrived, donning Santa Maria Elementary Education Association (SMEEA) T-shirts. Within an hour, roughly 300 SMEEA teachers were present, chanting “Respect!” in unison.
SMEEA, the union that represents teachers in the Santa Maria-Bonita School District, organized the rally to occur right before the school board meeting scheduled for 6 p.m. that evening. The protest was in reaction to the union and district being at an impasse in their contract negotiations. While the parties reached tentative agreements on most of the articles in the contract, there were a few places where the union put in its final offer and the district didn’t accept.
“We have been without a contract for over a year,” Fesler Junior High English teacher Joan Redstone told the Sun as she stood among the crowd. “They want us to teach more classes, with more students.”
Some at the rally also held signs protesting recent shifts in how teachers are allowed to use instructional time: specifically that English teachers can no longer teach full novels in class. Teachers and union leaders at the rally expressed that, from their perspective, being stuck at an impasse and the instructional shifts are both part of a larger picture of not feeling heard by the school district in recent years.
As an English teacher, Redstone said the instructional changes concern her.
“What we have right now are excerpts, pieces of novels. There is, right now, zero opportunity to teach a novel, and I think that’s atrocious,” Redstone said. “I think that needs to change and needs to be worked into the curriculum, or be a teacher’s choice.”
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District Director of Teaching and Learning Jennifer Loftus said she understands the frustration around change.
“I understand why there’s so much emotion around some of the shifts,” Loftus said. “Ultimately, the change is not being done because we don’t want kids reading those novels. … When we look at the list of novels that were being read, we can’t hit all of the grade level standards in a novel.”
She also emphasized that pacing guides—the documents that dictate how teachers should use instructional minutes—will be adjusted with teacher input as school begins to look more normal in a post-pandemic world.
“Formally, all of my department chairs at the junior high level have been brought into the loop of developing the guidance and also adjusting the pacing guidance for the upcoming school year,” Loftus said. “We anticipate having a traditional school year … They’ll have typical learning time, and so then you’re going to go back, and you’re going to adjust your guidance.”
While whole-class novel study will remain absent, the district is looking at other ways to incorporate reading.
“One of the ideas is … they would have some time set aside in class for what might be called a lit circle, and that is usually 10 or 15 minutes where the kids are in groups and they’re discussing the books that they’re reading,” Loftus said. “They might add an elective that would be specific to literature, to novel studies. They might add an expanded learning program before or after school that would be specific to novels.”
SMEEA President Jose Segura has concerns about this approach.
“They want novels removed from the instructional part of your day and into a supplemental or outside of the school day,” he said. “Just giving a kid a book to read, the chances that they’re going to read it and they’re going to use it to connect with their learning is pretty low.”
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From a union perspective, Segura said he has concerns with how the district treated an email it received a month ago regarding the curriculum changes.
“Right before the [April 21] board meeting, the district put out an email to all staff about novel studies. … And one of my members responded to the email with a nice letter that he wrote,” Segura said, referring to an email sent by Arellanes Junior High teacher Scott Rice, who taught English for seven years and now teaches electives.
Rice’s emailed letter, which Segura shared with the Sun, rebutted some of the points the district made and pointed out that a couple of lines of the district’s email were copied directly from an online article about novel studies. He replied-all to the district’s email and added school board members’ emails, Segura said.
The district’s new instructional approach, Rice wrote in his response, “insinuates that standards cannot be addressed though novels or that our district’s teachers are too inept to know how to teach standards through novels, neither insinuation is correct.”
Less than an hour after sending his response, Rice said it disappeared from the district’s servers.
“I do understand that I work for the district and my email is their property,” Rice said. “But it did disturb me quite a bit that they deleted it.”
Segura said he has concerns because deleting the letter relates to public records, “because the email was sent directly to the board members.”
Superintendent Luke Ontiveros said that Rice’s response violated district policies.
“The issue wasn’t with content; it was unauthorized use of the technology-use policy,” Ontiveros wrote in an email to the Sun.
As someone who taught English for seven years, Rice believes that “teaching novels is a shared experience using multiple ways to reach and teach students how to read analytically,” he wrote in the retracted letter.
But there are underlying issues that go beyond differing opinions on a novel’s place in the classroom. Rice and other teachers are also frustrated about changes to schedules, class sizes, and preparation time. These are some of the sticking points that brought the union and the district to an impasse in their contract negotiations.
“The district is pushing to mandate that we teach six out of seven [periods in the school day],” Rice said, whereas right now he gets two periods of preparation time. “Which would put us up to 200 students in classes and only 47 minutes of grading time. It’s been chopped away, little by little … So there’s a lot at play here, the novels is just one thing.”
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During the May 12 protest outside the district offices, Shawna Perez, a first grade teacher at Miller Elementary whose kids attend Santa Maria-Bonita schools, said she is frustrated not just as a teacher, but as a parent.
“I feel very invested in the district, because I am a product of this district. I went through Santa Maria-Bonita schools myself, and I had amazing teachers all growing up,” she said at the rally, which she attended with her three kids.
“We’re at a very difficult time right now where we feel like our voices aren’t valued and they don’t matter to the people who are making important decisions for our kids,” she continued. “By our kids, I mean my own children and my students.”
Send Staff Writer Malea Martin story ideas at mmartin@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 20-27, 2021.
