The McAllen Independent School District may cut planning periods for 374 teachers, a move that could save the cash-strapped school system a little over $3 million at the cost of riling up its teachers.
Middle school and high school teachers at McAllen ISD get a planning period in addition to a conference period.
According to the district, teachers use their conference periods to meet with parents or work on lesson plans.
They use their planning periods to meet with teachers who teach similar subjects and, generally, to plan to teach.
Planning periods also effectively mean that teachers at McAllen ISD don’t teach as many students in a day, a financial inefficiency not overlooked by an administration that’s been hacking away at a $13.8 million budget deficit for months.
Associate Superintendent for Instructional Leadership Jeanette Nino told trustees at a budget workshop Monday that eliminating planning periods for 40% of McAllen ISD’s middle school and high school teachers would save the district $3.01 million.
A small part of that money will come from eliminating stipends.
Nino noted that 14 teachers voluntarily teach during their planning period and receive a $5,000 stipend each every year for doing so.
If the district does away with planning periods, those 14 teachers will keep teaching the same schedule but the district can take away those stipends — which add up to a tidy sum of $70,000.
Not all of the district’s middle school and high school teachers will lose their planning periods under the plan administration proposed Monday.
Nino explained which 543 teachers would get to keep their planning periods through a series of color coded boxes.
Without getting into those boxes, administration generally recommended retaining planning periods for instructors who teach topics that the state tests kids on. Administration’s proposal also recommends allowing planning periods for some instructors who use them for travel time or need them because of how schedules work out.
The 374 teachers who don’t fall into one of Nino’s lucky boxes will have to teach an extra class every day.
In the short term, that probably means they’ll teach smaller classes.
McAllen ISD is overstaffed and actively looking to shed employees through attrition, a move the district says is necessitated by falling enrollment.
District leadership hopes downsizing through attrition will allow McAllen ISD to avoid layoffs or a reduction in force.
Small class sizes won’t persist once the district’s not overstaffed.
René Gutiérrez
“If we go with not the planning period, we will have a lot more teachers with smaller classrooms until they start resigning, retiring and we start closing positions,” Superintendent René Gutiérrez said Monday.
Gutiérrez isn’t the first superintendent to propose cutting planning periods.
A year ago, faced with similar budgetary problems, former Superintendent J.A. Gonzalez proposed eliminating planning periods.
That proposal died discreetly and trustees never discussed it very seriously.
Trustees don’t appear to be shying away from considering eliminating planning periods now.
Board President Debbie Crane Aliseda was the only trustee who criticized the proposal Monday.
“I just don’t think that the argument is valid enough. I don’t think that the money is true. I don’t think that we’re gonna see that money immediately,” she said.
Criticism is more general — and pointed — in the ranks of the district’s teachers.
Several showed up at Monday’s workshop to plead with the board to preserve their planning periods.
Jason Barrera, a theater instructor at McAllen High School, described himself as so incredulous that the district is seriously considering eliminating planning periods that he can only assume there’s been some kind of significant miscommunication.
If there hasn’t been a misunderstanding Barrera says he feels cutting planning periods is an affront.
“This is just a slap in the face,” he said. “And it’s unacceptable and it will lead to many teachers leaving the school district and losing faith in what this community has supported for so very long.”
Sylvia Tanguma, McAllen ISD’s American Federation of Teachers union president, says that opinion’s more or less general with her members.
Tanguma says about 50 of her members have reached out with complaints and she read the Progress Times a selection of their messages.
“I am so disappointed in our new board,” one message read.
“Is this the board we voted for? Is this what you asked us to vote for?” another said.
There was a general emotion common in those messages: a sense of betrayal.
The four candidates McAllen AFT endorsed in last year’s board election won.
In fact, Tanguma said, six of the board’s seven trustees received an AFT endorsem*nt in their most recent election.
Tanguma says the last time she can recall her members being so riled up was in 2021 after the McAllen school board voted to give federal ESSER money to the International Museum of Arts and Science and Quinta Mazatlan.
“McAllen ISD has always taken care of academics. It has never been on the backburner like it is right now,” Tanguma said.
Trustees aren’t alone in taking flak from teachers. Tanguma says her members have got their share of criticism for Gutiérrez too.
“He is doing to us what he did in Brownsville,” she said.
In 2020 the Texas State Teachers Association started a petition asking for a no confidence vote in Gutiérrez, at the time Brownsville ISD’s superintendent.
The petition criticized his leadership, particularly in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.
Gutiérrez didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Sylvia Tanguma
Tanguma argues there’s a good reason she and other teachers at the district are so upset. She described planning periods as a necessity rather than a luxury, saying they’re a time teachers use for things like phone calls to parents and making copies, the sort of work they’d be bringing home with them after hours otherwise.
So where should the district save money if it doesn’t cut planning periods?
Tanguma thinks the board should be considering making cuts in administration or athletics instead.
Planning periods, she said, are too valuable to lose.
“It’s hurting our teachers. It’s hurting our students. It’s hurting our academics. It is hurting the core of what McAllen ISD stands for,” Tanguma said.
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