“I am writing today to let you know that I am resigning my
position as PreK and Kindergarten teacher in the Cambridge Public
Schools. It is with deep sadness that I have reached this decision, as I
have loved my job, my school community, and the families and amazing and
dedicated faculty I have been connected with throughout the district for the
past eighteen years.
“I have always seen myself as a public school teacher and fully
intended to work until retirement in the public school system. Further, I
am the product of public schools, and my son attended Cambridge Public Schools
from PreK through Grade 12. I am and always have been a firm believer in
quality public education.
“In this disturbing era of testing and data collection in the
public schools, I have seen my career transformed into a job that no longer
fits my understanding of how children learn and what a teacher ought to do in
the classroom to build a healthy, safe, developmentally appropriate environment
for learning for each of our children.
“I have experienced, over the past few years, the same mandates
that all teachers in the district have experienced. I have watched
as my job requirements swung away from a focus on the children, their
individual learning styles, emotional needs, and their individual families,
interests and strengths to a focus on testing, assessing, and scoring young
children, thereby ramping up the academic demands and pressures on them.
“Each year, I have been required to spend more time attending
classes and workshops to learn about new academic demands that smack of 1st
and 2nd grade, instead of Kindergarten and PreK. I have needed
to schedule and attend more and more meetings about increasingly extreme
behaviors and emotional needs of children in my classroom; I recognize many of
these behaviors as children shouting out to the adults in their world, 'I can’t
do this! Look at me! Know me! Help me! See me!' I
have changed my practice over the years to allow the necessary time and focus
for all the demands coming down from above.
“Each year there are more. Each year I have had less and
less time to teach the children I love in the way I know best—and in the way
child development experts recommend. I reached the place last year where
I began to feel I was part of a broken system that was causing damage to those
very children I was there to serve.
“I was trying to survive in a community of colleagues who were
struggling to do the same: to adapt and survive, to continue to hold onto
what we could, and to affirm what we believe to be quality teaching for an
early childhood classroom. I began to feel a deep sense of loss of
integrity. I felt my spirit, my passion as a teacher, slip away. I
felt anger rise inside me. I felt I needed to survive by looking
elsewhere and leaving the community I love so dearly. I did not feel I
was leaving my job. I felt then and feel now that my job left me.
“It is with deep love and a broken heart that I write this letter.”
Sincerely,
Suzi Sluyter
February 12, 2014
View Video of Sluyter's interview/story Here.
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