Editor,

This past week was National Teacher Appreciation Week, and I want to give a heartfelt “Thank You!” to the Oak Harbor Education Association and the local teachers who rallied to protest the state Legislature’s failure to properly fund our schools last Friday on May Day.

Classroom sizes have reached detrimental levels. I’m abhorred by the fact that third-grade classrooms at local schools have 27-28 kids in them, especially since research demonstrates learning and classroom behaviors improve drastically with smaller sizes.

When classes get too large, teachers spend more time on behavior management rather than on teaching. Thank you, teachers, for fighting to reduce classroom sizes.

I’m also relieved that there are local levies to help fund the school and provide supplies.

When we lived in Shoreline last year, I had to spend $75 per child on school supplies, such as scissors, glue, tissues, etc.

The Legislature is proposing to take these levies away and distribute them across the state to help with their budget crisis. Is this what other parents want?

Teachers certainly don’t want it because they put themselves on the line. Then again, it is teachers who often bear the burden and purchase school supplies themselves. Is this what we want for our teachers and schools?

And lastly, thank you for fighting for all-day kindergarten.

Personally, I like half-day kindergarten because I think we are pushing reading and writing skills ahead of neuro-developmental timelines, but I understand the need for families with two working parents to have full-day kindergarten and not have to pay for it. I have twins, and it would’ve been more $500 a month to send my twins to all-day kindergarten.

My husband is a commercial fisherman, and we could not afford that luxury, so I opted for half-day. Consequently, my twins’ performances corroborated research that demonstrates half-day kindergarteners lag behind and enter first grade having to play catch-up to their full-day kindergarten counterparts.

So, I thank our local teachers who are fighting for fully funded, all-day kindergarten because they want the best for our kids.

Kerri Totten

Oak Harbor