"Red" Forman: Eric, what have I told you about calling your sister the devil?
Eric Forman: That it's offensive to the devil?
This year has been a period where the two days per week that I'm assigned to assist other schools have been a little crazy. I plan on visiting three schools and usually only get to no more than two of them because the teams need so much assistance that they often have a list of items for me, or I get called to help in a meeting of some kind that they're having, or I spend so much time fielding phone calls that it takes me forever to get to my actual purpose. But, such is the life, and I manage to get done what needs to be done, just not as quickly as I used to.
But some things which appear relatively simple wind up being some of the most complicated things to get done. And here's where a story begins. There may be a few variances, but here's the story as I know it.
Back in the summer, a mother at a school referred her preschool-age child to the Summer IEP Team at her local school, because she had concerns with his speech. The Summer Team met and, during the course of the meeting, had some technical issues with the computer system, so they couldn't print out all of the paperwork that they needed to. (Rule #1 for me is to always have blank forms available, especially during the summer, because You Never Know.) So while they had mom's verbal permission to test the child, they didn't have it in writing. Guess which one counts? If you said "verbal", then you're a dumbass.
OK, so the summer program ends and the team was unsuccessful in either getting mom's signature or testing the student. The Summer Team passes the child's folder on to his zone school. In the meantime, Mom enrolls him in a Head Start program which is close to, but not in, one of my schools. However, it's the zone school which gets responsibility for finishing the process. The zone school does make at least one attempt to finish up, but is unsuccessful. The zone school meanwhile learns that the child has also enrolled in our school's half-day pre-K, but nobody on my IEP Team knows about this. The zone school mails the folder to my school, but whoever gets it doesn't know what to do with it, and simply files it away.
Flash-forward a couple of months. I get a note from the Parent Response Unit which says that the kid's mother is wondering whatever happened to the speech her son was supposed to get. I do some research, which involves numerous phone calls and emails and lookups to figure out a bunch of other details. AND, I managed to find the folder, which had been so badly mis-filed. This is all in-between whatever else I have to do, so it takes about four days to piece it all together. I reply back to PRU. He gets the zone school to finish everything out and they write a speech IEP for the student.
So between me, the other school and the Parent Response Unit, we managed to get things back together for this youngster. Naturally, it shouldn't take this long to do something as simple as an IEP for speech service, so that struck me as a little weird: easy IEP taking forever to do.
Now, because the student is enrolled in a Head Start program, we have to file something called a Prevention Plan, which lets the Paperwork Monkeys know that someone has to be assigned to the student. It doesn't matter that there's already a Speech Pathologist in the Head Start; someone at the Puzzle Palace has to tell her to start servicing the student.
Prevention Plans are filed through the computer system. As it happened, the person at the zone school had trouble putting the Prevention Plan into the system, so on Friday afternoon she sent me a note, which she copied to her principal, letting me know about the problem and asking if I can help.
Again, something to complicate this kid's case! How unlucky can he get? Amazed by this, I sent a note back saying this:
This kid has been one long walk for a short drink of water, hasn’t he! J
and then promising to get it into the system by Monday.
It was a quarter of three when I sent this note. At a little after 4:00, I'm at Lake Clifton, still meeting with my boss (we often run late on Fridays, but to his credit we don't stay until 6 or even 7:00 anymore--thanks, Boss), when someone comes in and says there's a phone call for me. The name sounded familiar but I couldn't place it exactly.
I pick up the phone and it turns out to be the principal of the student's zone school. She's calling me specifically to tell me that she was offended by my note. Repeatedly. I think she's trying to drag an apology out of me on this, but my usual tactic is to pretty much let them talk themselves out. This wasn't happening in her case. Finally, she did say something that I felt compelled to reply to (some misstatement of fact; I don't recall the specifics), but she wouldn't let me say anything. I got about four words out and she began to plow right on.
I say to her, "Excuse me, may I finish? I let you talk and I think you could do the same for me."
Her answer was, "In a minute."
Anyone who knows me probably already knows the reply I didn't use, because this is the point where, as they say, you need to beware the anger of a patient man.
Here's the reply I did use: click.
I hung up on her. You know what? A) this person doesn't supervise me; B) nobody deserves that level of abuse and disrespect, especially when I'm ten minutes from the weekend; C) shut up when I've already agreed to do you a favor.
I go back to my boss, who hadn't heard the conversation. Clearly I'm still a little wound up. He asks if everything is OK, and I tell him "no." Then I tell him what happened and show him the entire email. Even my boss, who is sometimes hypersensitive about what gets put into emails (he's usually right about this, I have to concede), couldn't see what was offensive about my note.
This is starting to turn into a disturbing trend. But you know: there's an old saying in journalism that you shouldn't pick a fight with someone who buys their ink by the barrel. Likewise you shouldn't pick a fight with someone who PAYS for their blogging software. They're always looking for a blog topic to justify the cost.
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