90s44 Beginning of the 99-00 School Year

For a while now I have been using journal entries from the 90s for my blog and not really telling many stories although the entries are stories in a way. Part of the problem has been that I have been very busy and sometimes too tired to write much new. The other problem is that many of stories I could tell are too recent and involve people that are still around. I have changed names and references to make it impossible to recognize people or incidents but still tried to give the flavor of the experience. I will visit them again sometime and maybe tell more.

I have eight more entries to finish out the 90s. I have been writing a piece a week for what will be five years when I finish those. Then, rather than writing about the 2000s, I plan to revisit earlier years and tell more stories about those times. I won’t be as driven to write one a week and so they may not show up as often. I think some my fiction may show up in the blog as well.

Now, to finish the 90s:

The 1999-2000 school started off with a lot of changes. We had new superintendent in the district. I wrote that I thought he would be good and that I hoped the media would give him a chance. At Longfellow, we replaced several staff as others moved on. I was pleased with the new hires and optimistic about the year.

During the summer the building windows were replaced and it was determined that there was a structural problem in the classrooms in the northwest part of the building. An I-beam needed to be replaced and that is no small job. We couldn’t use three rooms until the work was done so we were pretty crowded.

I hired a half time person at the third/fourth grade level but after a few days of school she took a full time position in another building. I was very unhappy with comments she made to parents about her leaving even before it was official. I will write later about parent dissatisfaction with the half sections. What it meant was during half of the day students were in three sections and larger class sizes. The other have of the day they were in four sections. The latter was used for reading and math. I saw it as making the best of the situation but parents didn’t like it.

I had a parent that year who was giving me a lot of trouble. He wanted his special needs daughter fully included in the classroom. He was adamant that her daughter was not around those “other kids,” those with special needs. The parent seemed to have great contempt special needs children except for his own child, of course.

The parents were full of contradictions and anger about their child. They didn’t trust us and second guessed our every move. We kept careful notes and documented every meeting and intervention. I’ll probably write about this situation again.