Change

Lindsey Ervi
K-12 Board
Elem Interest Chair

I have been thinking a lot this year about change. Should I change schools? Should I change to teaching high school? Should I change districts? Should I change jobs altogether? And then I remember why I teach: the kids. However frustrated I may be with coworkers or parents, I have to remind myself that I’m in it for the students. To make an impact on them. To expose them to new ideas. To make them think and wonder. To inspire them. At any job, there are frustrations and people you don’t get along with and things you wish were different. But no other job has quite the same reward as teaching. But in the midst of my contemplation of change, my school’s Principal hit us with a bombshell we didn’t see coming with just over a month left of school.

The Principal at my school has decided to retire, and the process has begun of selecting a new Principal. Maybe this is the change I’ve been looking for. I have a very small sliver of influence into who this person might be, which makes me nervous. But I also have hope.

You see, things at school have been hard this year, harder than other years. Don’t get me wrong, I really respect and admire the now former Principal, but no one is perfect. Many members of the faculty have gotten quite complacent over the years because they knew how the Principal handled certain things (and didn’t handle other things). My first couple of years, I was oblivious to this, but slowly began to realize that I was working harder than a lot of other people around me.
I would try that new idea that was to be implemented, while others were all talk. I was prepared for all the snapshot observations that eventually never came. And in this last year, I became extremely frustrated. I’ve explained the feeling to some people as tap dancing in the corner, but nobody can see (or hear) me. I am the kind of person who wants feedback about their performance/work and will plan the scheduled observation during my worst class so that I can get some valuable criticism. But observations like that haven’t happened in the last two years; so my implementation of new ideas has gone unnoticed. Of course, I don’t teach for the recognition, but it is nice once and awhile to be acknowledged.

The school year was hard for many other reasons. We had an extremely physical group of 5th grade boys. Never had I encountered boys that wanted to touch each other so much. I can deal with the “girl drama” all day long, but that physical male interaction baffles me. I think I might like working at an all girl school. The school district was also rezoned sending us a neighborhood of kids that seemed to include every student with any type of special need from the other school. For example, we doubled the number of students with emotional and behavioral disturbance. We were able to hire an additional full-time Special Education teacher to work with students with Down Syndrome. Then, the PTA pushed so many fundraisers this year, it seemed like every time you turned around they were asking for more money. Our PTA is so supportive, but had chosen a somewhat outrageous goal: to purchase a sunshade for one of our playscapes. (They had purchased a sunshade for the other playscape the year before and just could not leave the other uncovered.) Though this is not a crazy purchase, it caused a financial strain on the school because things the PTA might normally have covered, they could not.

Did I mention I have hope? My hope comes from the possibility that the new Principal is not someone we know. If the Assistant Principal moves up, things may be the same. But I have a feeling that it might be someone from somewhere else in the district or even outside of the district. If it is someone we don’t know, I think the complacent teachers will be on their toes. Not that I expect the new principal to come in making radical changes, but I’m sure they will do some things differently and maybe shake up a few things.

We won’t know until midsummer who the new Principal will be. Besides the Assistant Principal, we will never even know who the candidates were. But I have hope that we get some new blood to renew the faculty, students, and families for an amazing 2012-2013 school year. I send this same hope out to you: that your summer is refreshing and relaxing to prepare you for next year.