BEVERLY — More than 100 North Shore educators and elected officials gathered Thursday night on Cabot Street to hear the stories of teachers like Brittany McGrail.
McGrail, who works at O’Maley Innovation Middle School in Gloucester, gave birth to her son this spring four weeks earlier than she expected. It was a medically necessary decision to protect both of their health, but one that would cut into the time she could spend with her newborn down the line.
McGrail’s original due date would have allowed her to take off the rest of the school year to bond and care for her baby without going unpaid. With the new date, and because she’d gotten sick with COVID-19 earlier that year, she didn’t have enough time off for her maternity leave to last through the summer.
Her choice: work the last days of school while she was still recovering, or take them off unpaid because public school teachers in Massachusetts are not guaranteed paid parental leave.
“It was a lot of money (we’d lose), but it was a decision that we had to make,” McGrail said. “As I sat there on the day I would be going back to work, I was still bleeding. I was covered in breast milk. I had a baby who was spitting up and had been sleeping for 45 minutes to an hour and a half.
“I was in no condition to teach a child, and I would have been going back had I not been lucky with my due date.”
While Massachusetts has a law that ensures many workers in the state have access to paid medical and family leave, this does not include municipal workers such as teachers. Until that’s changed at the state level, it’s up to local communities to decide if their teachers can opt-in to the state’s paid family and medical leave program without relying on accrued time off.
This was just one issue educators discussed during a forum on the state of local schools held Thursday night at the First Baptist Church in Beverly.
Officials in attendance included Beverly Mayor Mike Cahill, Gloucester Mayor Greg Verga and state Sen. Joan Lovely, D-Salem.
Hosted by North Shore Educators United, educators from Gloucester, Beverly, Marblehead and Revere shared how they’ve been impacted by schools without enough funding, wages that can’t support their families — especially for paraprofessionals — and the need for more support for students with emotional and social struggles.
Gloucester educator Kathy Interrante tore her rotator cuff when she was attacked by a student she was trying to calm down and needed surgery, she said. Beverly special education teacher Caroline Gilligan said she has been stabbed in the chest with pencils, had chunks of hair pulled out and comes home with bruises from students weekly.
It’s not rare for a teacher to leave work with scratches or bruises, or for them to be crying because of verbal abuse from students, the panel said.
Often, reports of attacks or severely inappropriate behavior by students are not responded to by administration, one Revere teacher said.
Without a properly staffed team of social workers, paraprofessionals and other types of support staff in schools, teachers are seeing larger class sizes and students are receiving less help when they need it, Marblehead educator Patrick O’Sullivan said.
“I was a professional firefighter for 34 years,” he said. “I saw more of my share of stabbings, shootings, overdoses and everything else, but nothing prepared me for what this is like with fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade kids in these conditions.”
There’s a crisis in local schools that’s causing more educators to quit, panelists said. The source, according to them: a lack of funding that leads to layoffs and a lack of fair pay for those who stay behind.
Marblehead teacher Mike Giardi said that while it takes a village to raise kids, teachers have to rely on individuals in the community, such as parents and businesses, to buy supplies or help fund programs at times.
“We are public education,” Giardi said. “Teaching kids is everyone’s responsibility, and I don’t think that we have done a great job of doing that.”
School libraries have gone unstaffed, electives have been scaled back and class sizes are larger than before, educators said.
“There is not enough staff in our schools to provide the required services to all students,” said Laura Newton, an elementary speech-language pathologist in Beverly. “If parents and the community knew how badly students’ legally required IEPs were being violated, they would be appalled.”
Many paraprofessionals work multiple jobs just to make ends meet, at the cost of spending time with family. Gloucester paraprofessional Margaret Rudolph said when her daughter saw her total earnings of $25,000 for a year, she quipped that she makes more working part time while in college.
“It’s embarrassing that I’ve committed to educating our youth, yet they make more than me working in the retail industry in their after-school jobs,” Rudolph said.
Contact Caroline Enos at CEnos@gloucestertimes.com.