Texas Insider

By Eva-Marie Ayala & Traci Shurley VA-MARIE – Star-Telegram

Teachers are on a mission to cut down the mountain of paperwork they say is burying educators across Tarrant County, and their representatives are asking local school boards for help.

“We want to work with them because the law in this case is definitely on the teacher’s side,” said Larry Shaw, executive director of the United Educators Association, a group that represents North Texas teachers.

The group asked Arlington trustees last week to follow the lead of districts such as Fort Worth and establish committees to examine the paperwork required of classroom teachers. The Arlington chapter of the Texas State Teachers Association also joined the call for a review of paperwork requirements.

Programs implemented by Arlington and other districts to track student progress and address discipline issues have led to an onslaught of forms that vary by campus and may be endangering teachers’ ability to do their primary job, the organizations complain.

For example, teachers in Arlington have to fill out a four-question “student conference” form before they are allowed to fill out the district’s “office referral” form. That second form, which is typically required when sending a student to the office, has four sections of information to fill out and more than 60 boxes for teachers to consider checking.

During last week’s Arlington school board meeting, administrators said much of the paperwork contributes to the efforts to increase students’ success and may also be required by federal or state law.

Some of the forms that the group submitted from teachers, however, weren’t required by the district, said Marcelo Cavazos, the district’s deputy superintendent. Cavazos said administrators try to apply a “sense of reasonableness” to the paperwork they assign, but they also want to give campus leaders the flexibility to manage.

In the case of the office referral form, he said campuses try to make sure that every effort is made to deal with a discipline problem inside the classroom.

“I think it’s good to go back and look at it,” Superintendent Jerry McCullough said. “If you asked me to come back every six months and talk about paperwork, I think that’d be good because we haven’t done it in the past.”

Studying the issue

Educators believe that some districts may be in violation of a state education code requirement that sets boundaries on how much paperwork classroom teachers can be expected to do.

State law requires that school trustees limit “redundant requests for information and the number and length of written reports that a classroom teacher is required to prepare.” It specifies that 10 categories of reports can be part of a teacher’s work, which include things like academic progress reports, reports for accreditation reviews, anything affecting student health or safety, and lesson plans.

A recent teacher climate survey in Fort Worth overwhelmingly showed that teachers thought the district required too much paperwork.

This month, the Fort Worth district announced that it will have a committee of teachers and administrators examine how to reduce the load.

The committee will meet at least three times a year to look for unnecessary, obsolete or redundant work and make recommendations to the central administration. The committee will also look for ways to use technology to reduce work.

Chief of Schools Robert Ray said administrators have been working on how to address paperwork concerns since the spring.

“In education, we seldom retire anything of practice so as we bring in new ways and new reports, we never retire the old ones,” he said. “So the paperwork gets higher and higher. We want to identify what work is redundant and be more efficient.”

Polly Walton, president of the Arlington United Educators Association chapter and an elementary school librarian, said it’s not that teachers don’t want to do paperwork — they’re record keepers by nature. But the lack of districtwide coordination, repetitive forms and requirements that fall outside what is specified in the law are causing them problems, she said.

She thinks that getting teachers together on a committee could help.

“Who can better figure out how to fix something that’s broken than the people who are dealing with it every day?” Walton said

In October, Keller teacher representatives submitted a list of complaints and suggestions to administrators that included an overload of paperwork, such as forms for goal setting and special-education referrals.

Officials said the district already has a committee of representatives elected from each campus to address and resolve such concerns.

eayala@star-telegram.com