For any education major, you know that there’s a tough courseload from the moment you begin classes at this university. But something that makes the entire experience much harder than it needs to be, is the lack of transportation. Within the first month of classes for your education major, students in education programs are REQUIRED to go off campus and perform up to 25 hours of fieldwork within their first semester. Even though there is technically a school on campus where fieldwork is advertised to be an option, not every student is able to have that opportunity. Many students without proper means of transportation are forced to arrange last-minute carpools, walk extended periods of time through possibly messy weather conditions, or schedule their entire day around taking the bus just for three hours of fieldwork.
For me, this was one of the big reasons I changed from an education major to an English major. Last fall, I did one semester of fieldwork at the Annie Fisher school right off campus, but with no way to safely walk to the school from the university—and since the required business casual attire made walking much harder than it already was—personally, I was lucky because I had the ability to arrange for someone to drop off a car the night before, just to use it for three hours. But the situation only gets worse from there; students have gotten assigned to do fieldwork at schools as far as Granby with no proper means of transportation to get there and very strict call times for when they are expected to be there.
This is not a fair way to treat students who pay tuition to go here. There are shuttle services that take Hartt students to HPAC- Can we not add shuttle services for education majors to take them to their fieldwork (especially if it’s at Annie Fisher)? Is there not a way to assign more students the chance to teach at the school right on campus (or at least partner with much closer schools)? All the hassle in just getting to the school before even doing the fieldwork makes the experience so much more tiring. Is this the way we want to cultivate our future educators?
