By: Lily Amback / News & Opinion editor
Government teacher Gina Iacobucci has been teaching at New Palestine High School for 10 years and, out of those 10 years, teaching dual credit government for seven years. This semester, however, she will not be allowed to teach this class.
Indiana University, which sponsors the class, has decided Iacobucci cannot teach the dual credit course this semester, because she will be on maternity leave during the fourth quarter. “I will be on maternity leave after spring break, and so I won’t be here for most of quarter four. I’ll be here the first 10 weeks of the semester, but then after that, those last eight weeks I won’t be here,” Iacobucci said. “And so I said that the class, because it’s a college class, needs an accredited teacher all year long. And basically what seemed like the best solution in my eyes would be that I would be the teacher for my students for quarter three since I am accredited and I am here. And IU said that that was not an acceptable option and that students either needed to take regular government and not get college credit or take online government with a different professor for the entire semester.”
Although this is not the first time Iacobucci will be going on maternity leave while teaching this class, it will be different from her last experience.
“The first time I went on maternity leave, I filled out a survey about observations that I was going on maternity leave and they never followed up with me about it. So they didn’t apparently know about it, even though I did put it in the survey. They found out with just a few weeks left in the semester because an email automatic response bounced back to them and they were mad, and they were threatening to not let my students get credit for the 14 weeks we already completed. It was around 14 weeks to the beginning of May and they had to enroll in online school for the rest of the year,” Iacobucci said.
This year, students will have the option to drop out of dual credit government and take regular government instead if they don’t want to take the class online. But, if they do choose to take the online version, Iacobucci will still be there for help, questions and activities.
“It’s come to my attention that the online class is mostly just textbook reading and there’s three tests through the semester and that’s pretty much it. I think there’s an obvious place for me to help my students understand the content because they need things to supplement what they’re reading week to week. So, I won’t be giving homework assignments because I can’t take any grades, but I’ll be doing lectures and learning activities that we do in regular dual credit government,” Iacobucci said. “Now the things that will be different are obviously I’ll be gone quarter four so that’s going to be different no matter what. But also the timeline of the class is different then how I usually teach it but I can figure that out…because they should know that I would put in 100% effort virtually, for the 10 weeks I’m here, for anything.”
