Educators & School Staff

Our teachers and staff are professionals dedicated to helping our students succeed; however, they have yet to be given the pay and resources they deserve. Our teachers, staff, and students are all intertwined, and it is our moral obligation as a district to give our educators the best resources possible so that they can give our students the world.

Improving Teacher Pay

Our teachers are tasked with the most difficult job imaginable: setting up our students for success. It is time that we treat our teachers with the respect and dignity they deserve, beginning with increasing teacher pay. We must pay and respect teachers as the professionals they are, and that includes increasing their pay to reflect their value. Our teachers are faced with closing the opportunity gaps our students face and providing all students with a pathway to future success, and this responsibility should come with respectable pay that incentivizes people to consider teaching as a career. We should ensure that teachers are given an increase in base pay, and further tie their pay to the cost of living in recognition of the difficulty of paying for housing, rent, and other services in a major metropolitan area such as Miami-Dade County. In addition, the creation of such a competitive base salary would serve as an effective means of attracting more qualified teachers to positions, ensuring that our students are taught by the highest quality teachers. By creating a new desire to participate in the profession and respecting the work our current teachers do, we can allow for our teachers to provide our students with the tools necessary for success. Our teachers are essential to ensuring the success of our students, and they must be paid and respected as such.

Supporting College Assistance Program Counselors

College accessibility is one of the keys to success for our students, providing them with the opportunity to explore higher education beyond our K-12 system if they so choose. Our district must set up students for success within the college application process, allowing them to achieve their dreams, while understanding the financial and procedural considerations associated with the college application process. For marginalized communities, the importance of understanding the resources provided to low-income and minority students in the application process, such as scholarships and financial aid, ensure that the prospect of college can become an affordable reality. In pursuing these goals, our College Assistance Program counselors serve a key role in ensuring our students’ success. These counselors represent a pillar in the pursuit of equity, providing students with a roadmap for the college process and the benefits associated with attending college. Our CAP counselors are essential resources for students to understand the complexities of college applications; as such, we must provide our CAP counselors with all of the necessary resources to assist our students. We must expand the current systems in place, through websites and other technology, to allow for easier tracking of student progress in the application process. This will ensure that our CAP counselors have a more holistic understanding of how students fare in the application process, providing them information beyond what can be obtained in a meeting. Our county must dedicate the resources to providing our CAP counselors with the most updated materials and technological tools available. In promoting a more equitable county, one which provides our students with an attainable path to higher education and the workplace, CAP counselors play an incomparable role. As a district, it is our responsibility to provide them with every tool possible to help them guide our students to success.