I was like you - taught 5 years in Title I and I got very tired of watering my little pathetic patch of grass. In 2014 I got the opportunity to switch and teach at a school you are describing. I taught there for 7 years. It was great for all of about 1 week until the ugly realities with a ‘wealthy’ population presented themselves:
1. Schools in wealthy areas typically pay into Robinhood, so there is very little district funding. Our district paid for busses and about $2,500 for classroom supplies for the entire staff. If a bond passed we could buy new instruments and uniforms. It was a joke. In order to supplement that, our boosters charged nearly a $1,000/year band fee per kid on top to supplement what our fundraising couldn’t cover. This mostly paid for our color guard instructor and percussion assistant, but this paid for drum heads, all marching supplies and equipment, marching design, office supplies, our copy machine rental, music for concert season, UIL fees, etc. We paid for TMEA out of our own pockets.
2. Involved parents and families are great until they aren’t. The amount of entitlement that comes with that is exhausting. You can expect that it your program has 200+ kids in an affluent school, you are dealing with at least one major parent issue a week. It’s a tremendous time suck.
3. Academics rule all. Families put their kids in these school districts because they want their children to go to top colleges. You cannot schedule a contest on an ACT/SAT day, AP review sessions are more important than band, and kids cannot miss their regular classes. They are over-extended taking all AP courses, and many kids will quit between 10th and 11th grade to focus on academics. Your entire job is to make band so exciting and worthwhile to them that it’s worth taking a dip to their GPA. This requires you to buckle on policies you normally wouldn’t because you don’t want to lose your top students. Because unfortunately, a lot of your best musicians are those valedictorian-chasing kids as well.
4. You will have to work 12 hour days to keep up with the other top programs. It’s an impossible standard to maintain and causes burnout. This is ultimately why I left: I loved my coworkers and students, but I couldn’t work the hours anymore.
Sometimes I wonder if I would still be a teacher if I stuck it out in Title I.
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