We face two more weeks of school, programs, obligations etc. before we are on Christmas break, and while I feel at peace, this year the road to Christmas break is a painful one.
We returned from our Thanksgiving travels to learn that two students from the school where I work lost their lives in an accident over the holiday weekend. Monday was hard. Twenty grief counselors arrived to support our students and staff, and they set up shop in the library. Tensions were high, and as the families worked together to find a place to hold a joint visitation and funeral, students and staff gathered pictures, offered support, started fund raising to offset medical and funeral costs for the families and started plans for a memorial service to be held at school on the Friday we leave for Christmas break. Tough stuff! An outside counselor told our staff that our students handled their grief with maturity. That comment saddened me because I think handling grief with maturity comes from experience, so that speaks volumes of the legacy lived by our kids.
An edgy staff now faces an audit team on our return to school next week. I have written before about the challenges of public education, and the public has bought into a measure of a school done simply on a test score, a test that every student takes regardless of their true academic ability. Our district has a huge population of homeless students and students living in poverty. It amazes me that we are being told that teachers use this as an excuse for poor performance. Andy, himself, asked how many of the "homeless" students are actually sleeping on the couches of relatives. Really? Does this not matter? Our family went through two eight day power outages in one year. You bet that impacted education in this household! A family in crisis does not exactly have school high on the list of to dos.
In our last week before we leave, we will celebrate our principal's retirement. It is no secret that she is leaving because the community that has been built in this school will be disrupted and ruptured because we have been labeled a school in crisis. It is ironic that this label comes even though we have increased the number of students going to college and passing advanced placement exams while our free and reduced lunch population has nearly doubled. We will finish that week with a service to honor the lives of two of our students.
Christmas shopping is just not high on my list right now.
sorry for the hardships and hurting friend. this is a joyous, but sometimes also heartbreaking, time of year. :)
ReplyDeleteThis was a hard post to read. So hard to lose students at a school and deal with all the emotions. We were also one of the schools that was facing what your school is now going through. Somehow, we were lucky and our scores improved enough to keep us out of all the chaos. I am not sure how when we have 7 projects that feed into our school. The things that these kids deal with at home and here we are pushing reading and math. Many will do whatever they can just to be there for 2 warm meals. We have our first snow day tomorrow and I wonder what some of our students will eat. Thinking of you and so empathizing!
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