What’s on Utah educators’ minds just before the state Legislature convenes for its general session next Tuesday? A survey of more than 1,400 teachers across the state points to a clear direction — prioritizing funding for long-term solutions that may mitigate their stress and burnout.
With a big focus on needed resources to tend to their classes, about 93% of members of the Utah Education Association (UEA) who responded to the survey oppose a potential expansion of controversial scholarship programs sponsored by the state, also known as private school vouchers.
Programs such as Utah Fits All “divert essential resources from public schools,” Renée Pinkney, UEA president, said at a news conference on Monday. Last year, the union launched a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the “school choice” program. That case is still pending, and the teachers are expecting to keep advocating against it.
“It’s very disingenuous to say that you can have a voucher program simultaneously running at the same time that you’re funding public education,” Pinkney said, “because we know that our students in public schools have needs that aren’t being met.”
To offer “school choice” options, the 2023 Utah Legislature set up the fund that can provide eligible K-12 students up to $8,000 for education expenses including private school tuition and fees, homeschooling, tutoring services, testing fees, materials and other expenses. In total, the program uses about $82.5 million in taxpayer funding a year.
This year, lobbyists from UEA will be advocating for at least a 3% increase of the weighted pupil unit (WPU) — the per-student unit used to determine costs and distribute funding to schools — above the required adjustments for inflation and enrollment growth. The union estimates that would cost the state about $135 million in ongoing funding.
UEA also wants to see money allocated for increased paid professional hours for all licensed educators, in addition to maintaining the Stipends for Future Educators program and allowing more families to access free school meals.
Students have greater needs
Apart from the funding priorities, teachers are also focusing on the quality of the instruction they can provide and other student equity efforts.
There are large classes and long, exhausting hours grading papers, all while juggling extra tasks such as making plans for students who need remediation.
“Our students are also coming with greater needs in every aspect of their lives, in their own mental health, in their own capabilities,” said Becky Bissegger, a teacher at Salt Lake City’s Meadowlark Elementary.
Ideally, she said, each classroom should have two adults at all times to help with behaviors, to support children as they learn how to work out problems, and to have an adult presence while the other teacher has to be away.
Janet Sanders, a teacher at Herriman’s Mountain Ridge High School, said that one factor that has increased stress levels among her colleagues is how behaviors in the classroom have “really gotten to be a much more serious issue.”
After the Legislature passed a law restricting diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Sanders, who’s a social studies teacher, said she has also felt pressure to be careful of what she says in class in an effort to remain neutral.
“I teach government, and it is very challenging, but it’s a challenge I’m happy to take on, to stay neutral. But, I think there’s a feeling of like we’re being persecuted,” Sanders said. “I think there’s a little bit of that feeling among teachers, that there’s just an anti-public-ed sentiment out there. There’s a movement where it’s privatization and we just feel threatened and we feel for our students, because we know that our students will not be well served.”
It’s likely that the Legislature will explore many education bills this year since Republican lawmakers have made education one of their top priorities. That’s something that awakens some concerns in Pinkney.
“There many times are solutions to problems that don’t really exist,” she said. “And we really have a request that those education bills are decreased, because it seems as though our legislators pass bills and then (…) maybe a few sessions after, they’re trying to fix the bills that they passed because it was so fast.”
Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.