#school administration

[edentherambler]

i wanna tell more people about what happened with pond.

what he did was not a one off thing.

admin has done nothing to support pond's victims and i will not stand for it.

the girl at assembly's speech was important. i might not have agreed with all the messages, but i can tell y'all one thing. admin has been too silent about the rampant sexual harassment and assult from pond.

i am far from the only one, just the first at school.

we need to speak up.

I need to speak up.

FUCK POND.

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Repost from @harvxrdpsc

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BREAKING: Harvard has violated its agreement with student protestors. This betrayal will prevent 12 students from graduating and place 28 on probation or suspension.

In the agreement reached to end the HOOP encampment, Garber promised to encourage Ad Boards to follow “existing precedent”. For other similar student protests, precedent is dropping charges and refraining from imposing severe consequences. This was the outcome for student organizers in the South Africa Apartheid encampment, Living Wage occupation of Mass Hall, Fossil Fuel divestment blockades, and Belinda Hall occupation.

The precedent is clear: drop the charges and do not heavily discipline students for calling for disclosure and divestment.

If the Ad Board won’t follow these precedents, they are failing to live up to Garber’s promise. If Harvard won’t live up to their promises, we see no reason to live up to ours.

[sararahrah]

Amidst all these posts of despair and frustration, I found someone's post I really resonated with. And it inspired me to write out my struggles with our current education system as a former cog in the machine. My apologies if this is more of a diary entry than a useful post. Just need somewhere to vent and figured someone out there might benefit from reading if they've had a similar story.

I quit my job recently. I worked at a school - started out as a teacher's aide and, in a little over a decade, rose up bit by bit to administration because I always lived up to my try-hard potential. Humbly, I can say I am/was skilled, dedicated, and influential, so people kept pushing me up with promises that I'd have so much more effect the "higher" up I moved. While I definitely saw the wider impact I could have, I also felt so bogged down, even shackled, by how much I had to bow to bureaucracy.

One of the toughest blows came when books started getting banned in our district. We'd worked SO HARD over YEARS to get our in-school library established and hired a librarian who partenered beautifully with teachers, parents, and community leaders. He held author talks for different age groups every two weeks, and hosted read-alouds between our more senior students and the elementary students next door on the weeks in between. He encouraged students to organically form book clubs and pushed all administrators hard to include a 30-min drop-everything-and-read (DEAR) block in Homeroom when we created the schedule for the year. He also created a schedule for ALL teachers to bring their students to the library throughout the month in order to ensure EVERYONE had a book of their choice available for DEAR. We didn't ask him to do a single one of these things - he was just that wonderful and that passionate about providing literacy for all.

He was also an incredibly lovely human being. He thoughtfully surprised me with a Munchkin board game on my birthday. Months before I'd mentioned I really liked board games ONCE when he struck up a conversation in the elevator with me and he remembered. He was openly gay and used his influence to create a safe space in his library for LGBTQ+ students. He also volunteered to mentor a few of our more troubled students - who, honestly, couldn't have gotten a better role model. I also recall he and his husband donated brand-new clothes to a closet in the nurse's office we unofficially reserved for students whose families were struggling financially.

Then, over a single summer, everything was pretty much dismantled. People from the district had started enforcing the bans and demanded all librarians purged their collection of any books included on the banned books list before the school year started. He advocated so hard against this. We all did. But he "made the mistake" of posting about this on his social media pages and commenting on how detrimental this censorship was to our students' education. Which rubbed a specific, particularly-conservative member of the school board the wrong way.

So they fired him. They claimed he was refusing to comply with the library guidelines set out by the district. It was above my head, and my boss' head. But we all protested anyway. Asked students, teachers, and parents to write letters describing his impact, good character, and upstanding status in our community. Wrote emails (with the attached letters) to the superintendent and school board members asking to reconsider, to allow him to continue his excellent work on our campus.

They wrote back that they'd read over all of our documents and, after carefully considering our requests, decided to stand by their previous decision. It took them less than 24 hours to respond. The next week I received a memo basically reprimanding me for going over my supervisor on the matter (I hadn't- she'd been spearheading our efforts). Unexpectedly, my boss' boss came in to give her a talking-to, intimidating her against involving the local news at the risk of losing, not only her job, but her team's.

Ngl, and I'm super embarassed to admit it, but that shut us all up. We have families to look after. We weren't really in a position to lose our income. I've kept in touch with the librarian and he found a new job at an elementary in a different district, but things just haven't really gone back to normal for him.

Things just got darker and darker as the year progressed and they slowly gutted the school more and more. Unsuprisingly, our scores started dropping and morale sank to an all-time-low. I felt watched. I lost track of how many emails and “surprise visits” I received from people in the district who basically demanded I justify every initiative I implemented at our campus. After getting COVID for the third time in as many years (which is its own LONG story), I rage-quit in the middle of the year. I foolishly believed the problem was the school itself and not the system.

I landed at another school, with more of the same problems. I had plenty of encounters with pushy entitled parents who wanted the best for THEIR kids even if it meant cutting funding for programs that other, less fortunate kids benefitted from. I had to implement demands from clueless district drones who came in with marching orders that were so out-of-touch with the needs of our campus and community. I had to sit through meetings where my boss' boss' boss screamed (although he denied he was screaming when I asked him to please stop screaming) about our low reading scores and low-enrollment in higher-level reading courses. After that, I started hoarding my money, just in case I wasn't long for that job.

Trying to constantly "keep goin'! No matter what happens!" after every blow started to seriously get to me. I put myself in therapy to try to find new ways to cope. But my body knew that just coping was bullshit. My physical health started deteriorating. I gained weight even though I was barely eating throughout the day. I slept horribly. My hair started falling out(!). My back, shoulders, and left hip were in constant pain. I was constantly on edge, fidgeting. Getting migraines about once a week. Getting sick all the time - which is so NOT a thing for those who'd worked in a school longer than 2 years.

Then, my mental health took a nose-dive.

One morning, I was driving to school and fantasized about getting in an accident because that would mean I wouldn't have to go in to work that day. In fact, if I died, I wouldn't have to work at a school ever again! What fucking peace. Finally, some rest from constantly having to throw punches even after taking a beating.

And that woke me the fuck up.

Three weeks later, with a lot of coaching from my therapist and honest conversations with my husband, I put in my resignation and requested two weeks of vacation time until my final day. I think my boss saw the distress very clearly on my face, which persuaded her to approve it all on the spot. I breathed so much easier when I drove home that night.

I'm honestly still haunted by the look on my boss' face when I left her office for the last time, after turning in my badge and key to the building. She'd just been told her other two administrators were being reassigned, even though her superiors were aware I had recently ressigned, and there were no updates on who would replace them. She was staring at her computer screen with a tortured faraway look in her eyes, shoveling food into her mouth - she had the opposite problem as me when it came to eating. That look, and the memory of my suicidal ideation to escape work, both reassure me I made the right decision.

However, as my savings are starting to deplete and my expenses catch up with my desperate job search, I can not help but wonder if I should step back into a role in education again. It's what I know, what I'm good at. . . Shouldn't I take advantage of that? And, unfortunately, I feel like this fucking system we live in is coaxing me to ultimately sign a macabre deal where the cost of keeping a roof over my family's head and food in their bellies is my life.

[intothestacks]

Adventures in Librarian-ing

I've been doing these training videos so I can put my name in to be an office sub on my day off from work and the PowerSchool guy talking me through the different things in the program has a thick yee-haw southern American accent and it's utterly delightful.

It's such a break from the kinds of voices people usually use for training videos.

[edvon-steam]

25 Free School Learning Management Systems

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Read More...

[teachinginreallife]

When administration makes decisions about a student, but don’t know any of the issues or background information

[sugarandnails]

K-12

All I have learned how to do is study

And memorize

And cram

With a heavy head, how am I expected to take to the skies?

I know nothing about survival

Unless grabbing the newest textbook counts

I know that it doesn’t

I guess they have failed to brainwash me completely

But I do know how to wake up and eat

Then study

Go to sleep

And repeat

Never fully knowing what the outside world is like

Never slipping out of reach

Never learning the things that will actually help me

Always shoving me down

Never letting me wonder what if

Never showing me why

But commanding me this way

And that

That’s for the authority

And the sentence

That I committed no crime for

It was quite unneeded

Trying to get me to conform

By using peer pressure

Then when its useful for you to say the opposite,

You say that we shouldn’t follow others and do as you say

Making me feel so, so little

While telling me to be an adult

Then telling me that I’m not an adult

And when I am one I will never be ready

I can't believe I am finally free

From this tortuous prison

That I used to feel embarrassed to be a part of k-12

But now I am done with k-12

So bye motherfuckers

I ain’t coming back

And I ain’t gonna be looking back

Because most of the faculty, staff, administration, and board members made me feel like shit

Believe it or not

But

School was made for kids

So stop trying to take over and ruin our lives

[teachinginreallife]

When I don’t agree with how administration handles a student’s situation