Higley Schools Blog

I’ve worked in plenty of companies in my day where employee morale was low. It is never a pleasant experience and in such situations people tend to jump ship when the opportunity presents itself.

I’m seeing a major morale problem at HUSD among teachers. Now admittedly I have not surveyed a lot of teachers in other districts so it is possible that low teacher morale is a problem plaguing our neighboring school districts as well, but I suspect the issue is especially bad in HUSD these days.

Here are some of the themes I have heard from our teachers:

1. We are not allowed to speak our minds. If we speak up about anything we face real retribution from the administration.
2. If we don’t kiss up to the current administration we find ourselves on the black list.
3. We don’t get trained on the tools we are supposed to use. This makes our jobs very difficult to perform well.
4. Some of our favorite colleagues have been essentially railroaded out of the district by the administration.

Now I am aware that these sorts of complaints can be self-feeding and that a certain level of Chicken Little hysteria can occur in these sorts of situations. But I don’t think we can ignore the way these teachers I have encountered are feeling about their work environment. These are the types of things that concern me most about our district and the responsibility for these kinds of problems rests squarely on the shoulders on the district administration in my opinion. If teachers don’t trust the administration it is the responsibility of that administration to:

A. Prove to the teachers through their actions that they are and always have been trustworthy. If they actually have been trustworthy all along and teachers don’t know it then there is a serious communication gap.
B. Become more worthy of the teachers trust. My guess is that the administration has lost the teachers trust through not being trustworthy. That is, I suspect that there has been a somewhat oppressive and retributive regime in place in HUSD for a while and the low morale is a consequence of that flawed management style.

This problem can be solved in a couple ways off the top of my head — get new administrators or require current administrators drastically to change their ways. I’m fine with with either option though I suspect that the former is a more likely solution than the latter.

What have you been hearing? Is there a real teacher morale problem in HUSD or is my sample of teachers horribly skewed? If the morale problem is real can blame be justly pinned on the administration or should the buck stop elsewhere?