First Day

Today was the first day of school sans kids. I will call it productive and insightful.

Where to begin?

I met my partner teacher and she was very helpful. The rumors were slightly exaggerated in my opinion but then again it was the first day and we are all still very relaxed. No kids yet! We cleaned out storage lockers and disposed of quite a bit. There is still a lot to do but we are just getting started. We are going to rearrange our small classroom and make it more student friendly and teacher accessible.

Most of the day was spent in a long, informative meeting with all teachers and aides. We got to dirt on what is going on with the school district. We have a new superintendent who is considered to be a reformer. She is bringing in a lot of her own people who are "young" which may translate into "inexperienced" but I need to see more. She got rid of a lot of positions such as teacher coaches. I think it was justified considering most of the coaches I've seen did absolutely nothing helpful for anyone. They had to return to the classroom which is a slap in the face. Therefore many have quit or retired. Make room for people who want to teach! They are going to give 23 schools in serious corrective action, including my former school, a lot of help with support staff. In other words those schools are going to be monitored, seriously monitored until they are completely restaffed or do their jobs. I'm glad I left as that is a lot of unnecessary stress.

My school is one of almost 90 that are receiving at least two additional support staff people. Also, the entire district will be monitored by teams of 4 people who have just been trained (e.g. inexperienced reformers) and will set monthly performance goals for each school and come in and monitor once a month. This is a technique that Edison Schools used and quite frankly never worked. Sending in inexperienced people to set goals for many schools of which none have ever worked in and of which they don't know the students and staff can lead to a disaster. Or not. Time will tell.

Overall, it was a good day. The short walk to and from work felt very, very weird and surreal. I'm not complaining. I'm not complaining at all!