Fright Train

[Reading a message off the Internet]
Holden: Fuck Jay and Silent Bob. Fuck them up their stupid asses.

--Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

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I am fully convinced that I have one of the most difficult jobs in the Baltimore City Public School System.

Actually, that's not quite true. Let me put it this way. The IEP Team Associate is one of the toughest jobs in BCPSS. I only get to do that job one day a week. My coworkers, whom I support the rest of the time, have the tough part, because they're immersed in it every single day.

Their job is basically to help ensure that a school remains compliant with Federal and State laws regarding Special Education, and to maintain this compliance within the confines of the Vaughn G. Consent Decree. (Link goes to an MS-Word document.) It's complicated, it's demanding, and it's not a job for the faint of heart. A bunch of teachers have tried to take on the job, thinking that any job out of the classroom is a cakewalk; a large percentage of them have gone back to the classroom to get some peace and quiet. It takes a lot of patience, a willingness to massage a bunch of egos, a facility for energizing and focusing a diverse team of people, and the ability to keep up with changes that take place in policy, procedure, and law. There's no real prestige in the position--in fact, it's a teacher-level position, not administrative--and while there's a lot of responsibility in the job, there's not a lot of authority attached to it. The best they can do is convince the principal that if something doesn't happen, there will be dire consequences, and hope that the principal will care enough to back them up.

There are so many weird little technical details, and the technology that the city uses to maintain it all is constantly evolving. So it's pretty crucial for these people to receive all of the training and support that they both need and deserve.

Which, of course, they do not get.

Last Thursday I get an email from BCPSS' Coordinator of Staff Development for Special Education Teams. Something like that, and I don't really care what her official title is. You get the idea. It says that there's a "Train the Trainer" session taking place on Friday, beginning at 11:30. This means that they're giving us 24 hours notice to clear our schedules and come to this session, to get materials for staff development sessions that are taking place on the following Thursday and Friday.

So my first thought is: I'm doing staff development? I mean yeah, I almost always do staff development, but usually I'm asked first. I sent a note to my boss asking if he'd volunteered me for anything. He said no, and told me that I'd have to decline to attend the session because it conflicted with existing duties. I did this and managed to get the materials from someone else who attended the session, so I could review them over the weekend.

You know, as much effort as they expend on putting the manuals together for these things, you think that the materials they give us for presenting the manuals and the information therein would be of comparable quality, but frankly it's not. Whoever sets up these staff development sessions (and I know it's not all the same person) sets a remarkably low bar for the presenters, and appears to count on ALL of the participants being remarkably stupid. But damn, if we were that stupid we'd be working at North Avenue.

I work with a lot of good, motivated people who tell me that most of these sessions feel as though they're designed to insult their intelligence. So what I find myself doing is taking the stuff that Central Office gives me, and re-writing nearly all of it in order to make it a little less boring, and a lot more relevant. This is what I spent the better part of several evenings doing, so that on Thursday my training module would look decent.   

On Thursday morning I get to Walbrook High School and get the manuals and stuff that we're supposed to be using. Now, remember all that stuff I told you earlier about what a tough job these people have? In many cases you can double all that, because a lot of these people are assigned to more than one school. Since the information in these manuals is usually designed to be used by all of the people in all of teams in all of the schools, it stands to reason that people who work in more than one school need more than one manual, right?

Wrong, according to the people in the Office of Special Education. Someone from that office actually walked around the room and, whenever they saw someone to whom I'd given an extra set of materials, took them back. She actually waited until I'd stepped out of the room to do this. When I came back I asked her what was going on. She told me that she'd been given orders to take the extra ones back, and that it was one manual per person. I said that this didn't make sense; people who work in more than one school are going to need a manual for each building. She shrugged and suggested that I take it up with a bigger paycheck than hers. So, naturally, I did.

I went to the Coordinator of "Training" and asked, "Why is R taking manuals away from people?"

"Because it's supposed to be one book per person," she told me.

"These people have more than one school. Aren't these books supposed to be used by the teams as well?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, how is the team in the second school supposed to see the manual if they don't have one?"

"It's one book per person," she repeated.

"But that doesn't make any sense," I insisted. "The teams can't use the books unless they HAVE the books. What happens to the extra manuals?"

"They get brought back to Central Office," she said.

"Yeah, but what happens to them then?" I asked.

This was her response: "                                              ."

I answered for her: "They get dusty. They don't get used, they take up space and they ultimately get thrown out, that's what happens."

"It's one book per person," she said yet again.

"But that doesn't make any sense," I said (yet again).

"It's one book per person," she repeated still once more.

"And it still doesn't make any sense," I said, walking away before I decided to smack the smug look off her face. I just kept repeating myself at that point because if I'd said anything else it would have involved the word "Fuckwit".

I honest to god don't understand the mentality behind this. It's almost as though there's a desire for people to fail, a need for IEP Teams to be uninformed (or badly informed). I really don't follow the reasoning behind this thinking, especially when it comes with her sneering "suck on this" attitude.

I've learned that there are a bunch of people who work for BCPSS who read this site, but who don't comment because they think they need to register with Typepad. This is not the case. Just fill in whatever blanks you care to (you don't have to be truthful) and put in your comment. If you have the Typepad account, feel free to use it, but don't sweat it if you don't. I'd be very curious to know what some of my co-workers thought of this month's session.