Teachers skip service meetings

There were a sufficient number of Moorpark Unified teachers not attending the afternoon inservice meetings. This necessitated the teacher's union to change their contract to hold an in-service meeting once a week in the morning. This requires each school to start their classes about one hour later one day a week. Children are now left at home, some are unattended and others are in various Moorpark retail parking lots and parks. Most are unsupervised.

Teachers require all students to be in class, in their seats by the time the bell rings every day. Those teachers who refused to attend afternoon inservice meetings have now caused students' schedules to be turned topsyturvy. All parents, whether working or not, now have to deal with the hardship of how to handle this.

As professionals, teachers should be thinking of their students' continuity instead of what they have to do in the afternoons besides attending an in-service meeting.

A solution could be having inservice meetings once a quarter, making them "quality" instead of small "quantity" meetings. Karen Dittman Moorpark