Monday, November 19, 2012

Please share this letter...

Hello,

My name is LeFerna Walch and I am a new PESG employee (Professional Education Services Group) of Michigan. They are a wonderful organization, but still governed by Michigan Department of Education (MDE) that issues them a guidance manual to go by each year.  I went through all the classes (and extras) got my background check and fingerprinting done completing all the required substitute teacher training and was waiting my first assignment as a substitute teacher when att the last minute I was told that they could not accept my college transcripts because according to the MDE because my college was a nationally accredited college instead of a "regionally" accredited college.  You can only imagine how disappointing this was. I was looking forward to working with the kids SO much... I am still working through PESG as a paraprofessional until I can get this straightened out. 

Now, it looks like I have no idea how to get my Sub Certificate except to "fight for it?"

I was hoping to find someone who can help me with this... but so far I have just gotten a lot of people scratching their heads, not getting back to me, or getting tired of me and just brushing me off. I finally contacted a lawyer and I haven't heard back from them yet, either. So I must be striking up a good point, anyway.  My main question is how can my US Government's Department of Education allow Michigan's Department of Education to refuse a $60,000.00 education that they approved for the college loans for?

So far I have found that the job of substitute teacher in Michigan is listed as a Civil Service job (Class 924 item 75) and the MDSC said it now uses the Council of Higher Education or CHEA's list of accepted college accreditation services as their new guide for accepting college accreditation.  My college, accredited by ACICS was approved and added to this list September 2012.  So this could possibly mean that the PESG manual from the Michigan Department of Education is not up to date, or unfortunately, Michigan is stopping substitute teachers from being able to benefit from their college education by not accepting the college list of accepted accreditation that other civil service jobs do? Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't this sorta sound like discrimination to you? 

I think we would have a lot more qualified people willing to substitute teach if we could fix this problem. I don't think Michigan is the only state doing this. Other colleges are not willing to transfer credits from colleges of accreditation that is not "regionally" as well. I think we are getting into politics here... which was not my intent.

My platform is actually about finding and helping the bullies in our schools. I believe that we would have a lot less bullies in school if we had less bullies in our adult world. In order to stop this we need to find them and help them when they are young, and it is my thought that since substitute teachers seem to bring the bullies out in the classrooms... with the right teaching skills, they could be the ones to help a lot of these kids... based on pride and saving face, in most cases I think the bully would be more willing to learn from a teacher when they think they won't see that teacher again. So I do plan on furthering my education in the direction of child psychology... so it was very upsetting to hear that my own state won't accept the 90 credits I have earned so far.  

Like this Youtube video says; "I want to be a substitute Teacher!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHR83Z0QMhI


If you would like to publicly comment on this, or know of anything that may help, please contact me at the following blog address-

http://peabody4america.blogspot.com/


Thank you,


LeFerna Walch

http://www.youtube.com/peabody4america
blogspot.com/peabody4america

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