Teachers in Texas have a right to 450 minutes of planning and conference time every ten days. However, many school districts think it is OK to take away that right when TAKS testing comes along. That policy violates teachers' rights. The Texas Education Agency reportedly indicated that teachers should be offered that planning an preparation time even during TAKS.
After several employees at a Fort Bend high school complained about the issue, the Fort Bend Employee Federation contacted the school district and FBISD in turn called TEA. Rather than re-formulate an entire schedule set out for teachers during the week of TAKS testing, one school opted to have the teachers email the principal as to whether they still wanted to keep their planning time. Teachers were offered a duty free lunch, which is also their right in Texas.
So if a teacher wanted to keep their planning time, it was offered to them, but they had to stick their necks out in writing to let the administration know they still wanted to keep it.
In a time when teachers are laid off without much warning and with little or no consistency in the procedures used to determine who gets laid off, there were only a few brave souls who opted to keep their right to a planning period.
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