Speaker: Megan Schmidt
Please share: Your name, the city/area you teach in, the grade you teach, your class size and factors that make your class complex.
Megan Schmidt: Hi, my name is Megan. I am a grade six teacher in the crow's nest pass in Southern Alberta. I currently have 25 amazing little humans in my classroom. However, I am always the only adult in my classroom with these 25 humans in this room. I have many students who have, um, I SPS I have many students who struggle with uh really foundational literacy and numeracy skills and I have students who require scribing support on a regular basis and I love my job. I love teaching. I love these kids in my class. I think they are all wonderful, but it is exhausting to be one person with 25 Children who need high levels of support. And I often feel that I am failing as their teacher and that I am not always able to meet their needs. I struggle so much with feeling the need to do more and more for these kids, but I'm so limited uh with the resources that are available to me. And unfortunately in my school, um we do not have many eas less than half of our classrooms have E A support at all and we do not have e a support for academic needs as the behavior needs in our school um require full time e A support. So I constantly feel like I have so many students who, if they had that little extra one on one or small group time with an adult, either myself as the classroom teacher or an education assistant that we could help fill those gaps. But so often more than not, my attention is split between managing behaviors. Providing, you know, I can do small groups with a few students at a time, but only during certain parts of the day and certain activities because we do have times where I'm directly teaching, we do have times where if you've ever taught grade six and you know, that behaviors and managing those can take away um from academics. And I just wish that our government provided the funding in our schools so that we could be supporting these kids and filling those needs. Especially right now, our um higher level, like our older elementary students, grades 4 to 6 were all incredibly impacted um by COVID disruptions to their learning when they were supposed to be building these really foundational skills. And since that time, we have continued to lose supports and fundings in our schools and we haven't been able to fully address those needs and bridge those gaps that these students have. And at the end of the day, it's exhausting and I go home every day. Feeling like I haven't done enough for these kids, like they're not where there should be and it is exhausting. And at the end of the day, as a classroom teacher, I have the same goal as parents. We want your kids to be successful. We want what is absolutely best for them. And ultimately, we need the government on our side to support these kids and make sure that every classroom in Alberta public schools especially are getting the supports and the funding that they need to make sure that we don't have all these kids falling through gaps. Thanks.
