Schools are laying off auxiliary staff, but teachers are taking CZK 50,000 a month

And here it is. The situation in education has been unsustainable for a long time, but now it seems that it has finally “slammed”.

Although teachers still feel that they are paid little, in reality their salaries are very decent. About 50,000 CZK per month is already visible in the family budget, and the above-standard amount of vacations, breaks and similar benefits make learning quite a nice thing. But now education has started to run out of money and schools are closing. Surprisingly, however, auxiliary workers such as cleaners, cooks, janitors and the like carry it, i.e. people without whom the school would fall on others’ heads. I don’t see the logic in that. While teachers are paid very decently, the helping professions are not. So it would be enough to “get rid” of one teacher and suddenly you have money for a cook and a cleaner, and you still have a little left over for rewards.

The teachers did go on strike with the auxiliary workers, why not, extra time off is always useful, but it was useless. The hours paid by the state will be reduced and the responsibility for how to solve it all has passed to school principals, whose job it is. But they pretend that they are nothing, that they are musicians and throw all the blame and responsibility on the state. It is a mystery to me how it is possible that some schools can cope with the newspaper without problems and other schools seem to be unable to withstand the situation and go under.

I think we are slowly approaching a point where public schools will be looked down upon in the same way as in America, for example, and the vast majority of parents who care about their children’s future will send them to private schools. It is therefore possible that we are on the threshold of a change, when the free education we have in the Czech Republic will only be used by future social cases with a doubtful future, and the middle class will start sending their children to private schools with high-quality and modern education. The upper class has been doing this for a long time, and because of this, their children stand out from their peers and have a foot in the door for success “from infancy”.

Personally, I think that schools should start saving in the right places and, above all, try to make some extra money for themselves. Whether it’s weekend or evening rental of gyms, courts, swimming pool or football field, or organizing family gatherings, following the American model, where people get to know each other, bake some goodies, which they then sell to each other, and the proceeds go to the school. Considering how poorly non-pedagogical workers are paid in schools, one school pool could support several cleaners. I think that the situation has now arisen for school principals to prove whether people are in the right place or whether the reorganization of the staff should start with them.

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