90s41 End of the Year

From about April 1st on things get hectic in an elementary school! Teachers are working frantically to cover material, complete end of year reports, do all of the required “end of the year” assessments and everything else. At the same time the district is planning for the coming year. That includes enrollment projections and staffing for the next school year. Some staff are notified that they will be moving to another position or building. It all makes for a very tense time of the year!

Each year there is a meeting at the central office when you get the official enrollment project and staffing for next year. I always dreaded that meeting! I dreaded even more having to go back to my building and share the information with the staff. The very worst part was having to tell someone they wouldn’t be in our building next year.

Monday, April 5, 1999 – Wow! I have been very busy and not had much time to write. We are doing staffing for next year and the budget. Enrollment will be down so we will probably lose a teacher. It looks like we’ll be having two kindergartens, three 1/2, four 3/4, and three 5/6. I don’t know how the parents will react to that. Time will tell. Negotiations are still going on so when that is resolved it may change things.
We are interviewing for our interpreter/associate position. We have done three and will probably do three more.

Tuesday, April 6, 1999 – We probably made a big mistake today, but I really didn’t know any way out of it. We have a special needs student who has a full-time associate during the year. We were discussing whether the child would need extended year. The team unanimously felt that it would benefit the child. Thinking the parents would want summer school we were trying to decide how we could pay for it if the parents didn’t want to pay themselves. The parents were 25 minutes late to the meeting. We agreed the child could benefit from extended year, identified the skills that would be maintained and then the parents said they didn’t want summer school. Our AEA consultant then came up with the option of a tutor for 45 min. a day, four days a week, for six weeks. That will definitely be unpopular at the central office, but had painted ourselves into a corner and weren’t able to be quick-thinking enough to get out of it. The problem is it sets an expensive precedent. It will cost the district about $360.

Monday, April 19, 1999 – I sent my self-evaluation over to Tim last week but forgot to include this with it. I’ll send it over today. We are struggling to get everything done before the end of the year. I’m trying to get all of the teacher evaluation stuff done but it is really time consuming. The Seminar in School Leadership class met this morning and had an interesting session. It was primarily about accommodations for special needs kids. We used two or three of Autry’s pieces from Life and Work. We only have one more session. That will be on May 3rd.