This post is a response to Stella’s original blog post here:
As I am reading Stella’s blog post, I can immediately sense the frustrations that she encounters in her workplace, but also the desire for an improvement. I really appreciate Stella’s honesty in sharing her thoughts and situation. As a father of two young children and one of them just entered Kindergarten, I really appreciate our educators here in British Columbia. For the past two years, my wife and I were struggling to make a decision in terms of whether to place our son in a public school or private school system. On one hand, we have the public school system where it’s is accessible and it is completely funded by the government. The resources that we would save would mean we can invest it in other types of learning such as after-school sports or music program. On the other hand, we very much value the Christian school setting, where our beliefs and values can be further reinforced by the school community. With the recent media attention of the SOGI123 resource implementation in various school districts, as a parent, I feel the public school system no longer provide parents with the opportunity to provide input to their own child’s education. Ultimately, we have decided to place our son in the Christian private school that is in our neighbourhood for the above reasons, in addition, to show support in the private Christian school system. My son’s school is now expanding in capacity and looking towards building a new campus. This is a good sign that we have many people in our community that values Christian teaching at our schools. As a response to Stella’s comments on exposure, I would like to provide a bit of an encouragement that while public school systems do seem to engulf by the public sector, there are many families that appreciate the Christian schools and teachers in the community. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I would also like to touch on Stella’s point regarding morale and Stella’s thoughts on being surprised by the number of people that are working below-standard. This is also something I notice at my workplace as well and unfortunately, this happens more often then we might think. One strategy to overcome this is to hold people accountable. As suggested by Lepsinger, R. (2010), “high level of accountability will take initiative to ensure the success of a project, provide early warning of potential problems, and take action to resolve a problem”. The lack of accountability often allows people to “slide” without notice. I would encourage Stella to consider some strategy and system of accountability in the workplace to see if that would help in staff morale.
Reference:
Lepsinger, R. (2010). Closing the execution gap: How great leaders and their companies get results. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.