Marching In Place

Casey McCall: And Tanana, who obviously can't see the end zone marker under the virgin snow, breaks into his touchdown dance on the ten-yard line, only to be given a geography lesson by linebacker Marvin Watkins. That's an incredibly embarrassing moment for any professional athlete, so, when we come back, we're gonna show it to you a couple of more times, if only so that I can keep saying "virgin snow."

—Sports Night, "Intellectual Property" (10/13/98)

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The reorganization in Baltimore City Schools is going to be both more and less complex than I thought.

The Elementary and K-8 schools are indeed going to be brought together under a single umbrella, but from a Special Education standpoint (I'm not sure about anything else) they will still be monitored by one of four coordinators. The coordinator for any given school could change, however, because:

If you remember a post or two ago (I'm not linking; scroll down, lazy-ass), I noted that the schools were divided into four areas which had nothing to do with where they were located. Well, it turns out that we're going back to the geographic areas. In addition, a fifth area, which was reserved for schools that were repeatedly having difficulty meeting the Adequate Yearly Progress (as defined by No Child Left Behind), is getting folded back into this group. This means that there will be 108 schools to monitor, not 93 as I thought. And each coordinator will get one-fourth of this group, or 27 schools each. This is more schools than I'm working with now, but not the most I've had. (That would be 29.) How those seven areas are going to be divided among four people is beyond me. The way I (and my boss) originally thought it would happen is, on second glance, not going to work, so they're going to have to come up with something.

And there are still rumors of big changes happening at North Avenue, ranging anywhere from re-deployment of staff to layoffs to the elimination of entire departments. Suddenly I'm glad that I was passed over for promotion last year.