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2006-09-08 - 9:50 p.m.

Playus Interruptus!

I was just about back into the groove with this journal. I was just about to have some fun again writing here. I even had a couple of ideas to play and tinker with. Then work got in the way. Bye bye Chateau BowWow!

I can’t go out on the limb and say I haven’t been in the Dog House…oh, no, I have been…but I can’t piddle around at the Chateau, either…not for a while, anyway.

My play has been interrupted by work, and we’re all going to be in the Dog House. At least I won’t be there alone! The dog house is going to be full! Packed. Crowded! Three deep. Misery loves company, and there’s going to be a lot of miserable company in that house!

Schools have to go through accreditation on some kind of rotating, routine basis. We have always been accredited by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). And we pass with (cliché) flying colors (gawd knows how we do it). We’ve been there, we last did that in 2005. Then some idiot at DESE decided those schools who serve adults and high school kids need to be accredited with the community colleges and universities. It all has to do with Title Four federal funding. To get Pell Grants and all the federal dollars, we need accreditation…by a different entity. We’ve always been forced to go through accreditation at the state and federal level. And that is okay, we’ve done that and passed that with DESE evaluations. Now, the state has decided to parcel that accreditation and that team eval out to a private firm, and we have to jump through the hoops again. And pay tens of thousands of dollars to get it.

And so we’re hamsters on a tread mill trying to get there.

The problem isn’t that we can’t get there, it’s HOW we’re getting there. We’ve known this was coming down since September of 2005! We know the amount of work this will take. We are, after all, not effin stupid! Fer crine out loud, we’re educators. We have brains! Oh no, we’re certainly not stupid! What we are is lost on Someday Isle! We have put this off until the last gawdam minute………and now we’re hamsters on crack on the treadmill!

My writing time has been spent writing to standards on this evaluation, writing curriculum (with diva) and grabbing my ass and just plain running! Oh, shit, you mean we have kids (and adults) in this facility we’re to be serving? You gotta be kidding? And we’re going to be evaluated on how we work with them? Forget that shit!

And we’re an alternative high school serving upwards of 400 kids…and, on the average, maybe we serve 50 adults in our health care and business programs. Never mind all that……..we have to do this evaluation. And gawdam PAY FOR IT! And then next year, we’ll have to do another one for another entity for the 400 high school kids.

We’ve known for a year this was going to happen, we are now three weeks away…and we’ve now decided we’ll do something about it?

Pour me a stiff one… oh, please, pour me four, big stiff ones!

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