80s49 Big Changes

Life is full of choices. Sometimes you make the right ones and things go well. Sometimes you make the wrong ones and they come back to haunt you. And sometimes you make calculated choices that you know are the right thing to do but realize there might be some negative repercussions at some point later on.

That happened to me. I chose to be a teacher advocate, chief negotiator for our education association and the grievance chair for a while. Each put me at odds with the administration or school board from time to time. I knew there was a chance that at a later time it might be used against me.

It was. At least I think it was. In the spring 1989 I applied for an elementary principal position in our district. I got an interview but did not make the final cut. I can’t say for sure that my history in the district kept me out but strongly suspect it was a big factor. About the same time I applied for a job as a shared curriculum coordinator for the Mediapolis and WACO school districts. I was offered and took that position at a significant salary increase.

I was hurt that after 18 years of very successful teaching in the district I couldn’t get the principal job but realized it was time to move on and see what the future held for me. I thought there was a chance I could return to Mt. Pleasant at some point in the future. I’ll tell more about that when I get into the 90s stories.

The more I thought about the new job the more excited about it I got. I was interested in curriculum and staff development and this would be an opportunity for me to test my skills.

I had several people come to me and tell me they thought I should have gotten the Mt. Pleasant job. I hadn’t resigned from my teaching position because I hadn’t received a contract for the new one. I could tell administrators in Mt. Pleasant were suddenly nicer to me and a bit nervous. I couldn’t figure out what was up but wrote about their untypical behavior in my journal.

In the middle of May my principal came to me and asked me when I was going to resign. He pressured me to do it that day. It made me uncomfortable. I said I wasn’t going to resign until I got the contract for the new job. He said the board was meeting the next day and the superintendent wanted me to resign.

I did not and can only speculate about what was going on but have some suspicions. One was that there was considerable unhappiness in some quarters about me not getting the principal job and if I resigned it took some of the pressure off the administration.

A few days later I got the contract, signed it, and resigned from my teaching position. I was happy and some were happy I was gone. I started attending events in both schools and began to work on the transition out of the classroom. After being there 18 years, leaving teaching was a big transition.

You are nothing if not a story. It is up to you how good that story is.