During the 2007-08 school year, more than three-quarters of Douglas County teachers said they thought the district was “moving in a positive direction.”
By last month — after two years of staggering budget cuts and turmoil over a proposed voucher program — the number had dropped to 14 percent.
The answers came in surveys, the first conducted by the district, the latter by the teachers union. The most recent survey found similar slides in the number of teachers who felt district support in the classroom and among those who said the “climate and culture” create a positive work environment.
In 2007, 80 percent of respondents felt the climate and culture were positive; in December, that had plunged to 14 percent.
On Thursday, union president Brenda Smith sent a letter to district leaders stating the union is “alarmed by the drastic drop in employee morale and confidence” in the district administration that the survey reflects and invited them to join teachers on a committee to explore ways to improve morale.
Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen said she had not had a chance to read the survey results in detail but planned to.
“This is definitely a data point we want to pay attention to. We are very interested in what teachers think,” she said.
She said the district is working on a revamped survey to be done this spring.
Smith said the federation contracted a third-party group for a survey because the district hadn’t done one recently. Roughly 2,500 of 6,500 educators responded.
Smith said many of the questions were the same ones used in past district surveys.
She said the change in responses represents a climate shift since a pro-voucher majority was elected to the school board in 2009.
“I think the overall feeling of teachers and employees throughout the district since this board has come in is that the focus has shifted away from what’s best for kids to what I believe is a political agenda,” Smith said.
But Fagen said the reasons for any teacher dissatisfaction may be more complex.
“This has been a really economically challenging time,” she said, with teachers going years without raises combined with cuts across the district.
Through all that, the focus on the classroom and education quality has not waned, Fagen said. The district is always working to enhance its work and looking at ways to make teaching more effective, she said.
The Douglas County School District is one of the highest-performing districts in the state, based on student-assessment scores.
Historically, the district has had an uncommonly good working relationship with the Douglas County Federation, which is separate from the state’s largest teachers union, the Colorado Education Association.
However, fissures may have developed during the November school-board race, when several candidates presented the union as a something of an education bogeyman.
Karen Auge: 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com
