Sardines

Ordinarily I'd wait until Friday to post this, but I'm really pissed. So, we have all this crazy school-moving nonsense that we've been dealing with. We thought it was a done deal and we were going to Calverton Middle School and it was going to suck but maybe we'd be alright. Then yesterday, Tom and some other school folks went with Dr. Peters to see what we had available to us. Turns out it's an utter impossiblity.

We will have only 16 classrooms. That's for 32+ teachers and 600+ students. They are small, middle-school sized classrooms. We will have lunch at like 10 am and 1:30 pm. We will share a gym with middle schoolers, trying to both teach class in there at once. We will have to go into the middle school or elementary school wing to use the restroom because the restrooms in our wing have been condemned. There is no reasonable place for a science lab or art rooms. We will have no intercoms. We have one small classroom to serve as the office for 10 or so office staff and administrators. And this doesn't even begin to cover the problems with going there, like they're way more dangerous than us. Also, we have more Crips than Bloods, so we have few conflicts because we have a dominant gang. Well, they've got more Bloods than Crips. Guess what will happen when we mix? A very violent neutralization reaction. {Ugh, I can't believe I just used a Chemistry metaphor in reference to gang quarrels} So this is not cool.

Tom and Tony, being the admirable human beings that they are, stayed up very late to create an action plan for how we might change this abominable situation. They presented their basic idea to the group at this morning's PD, only to be kind of waved aside by Dr. Peters. She was making me wicked mad this morning, talking about how it was an awful option but we were probably going to have to do it anyway...like she didn't really feel like fighting about it. So I figure this attitude has two possible causes - either she thrives on drama and she really wants the challenge of even MORE adverse situations so she can feel some sort of moral justification, or she is quitting next year. Or she doesn't like that someone came up with a way to stop this that she couldn't come up with. Either way. The plan in the works is to contact the district, and if they don't fix it then we contact the state, and if they don't fix it then we go to a variety of powerful individuals and media folks. If you've got suggestions or connections, ideas would be very useful at this point.

On a side note, I was so upset about this that I yelled at two of my favorite students this morning, and then felt bad, but then told them what was up...I'm hoping we can finally get them empowered over this....