Morale

Remember: Teaching should be fun. No PFT members are afraid of hard work. Hard work and dealing with out of control schools, though, aren't the same thing.

Too many teachers are experiencing a level of stress that is unhealthy and absolutely unnecessary. We need to create conditions in which we can work hard and productively. Then, we won't have teachers who dread getting up to go to work every morning.

We will work hard and we will have fun doing so. We will no longer allow ourselves to be stressed out and run down by chaos.

As PFT leaders, we will survey conditions in our schools. Teacher morale should be high. If teacher morale is high, student morale will be high. The converse is also true; hence, low morale can't be tolerated.

We will visit schools with low morale continuously until morale becomes high. If there's a school in which morale remains low because of poor leadership, lackluster discipline, etc., we will -- if the problem isn't immediately fixed -- ensure everyone in the city knows about the problem until it DOES get fixed.

We firmly believe that administrators (top-notch administrators whose teachers have high morale) should conduct inservices for administrators whose buildings are lacking in the morale department. We want to give administrators the opportunity to improve; however, if things don't improve or if they get worse, votes of no confidence must be taken. We can't allow our students to suffer from poor-quality leadership.

We teachers deserve to be able to work hard in conditions that allow us to constructively do so.