Baltimore Diary

Unfortunate Events

Sideshow Bob: [Bob is calling into a radio show] I am presently incarcerated, imprisoned for a crime I did not even commit. "Attempted murder," now honestly, did they ever give anyone a Nobel prize for "attempted chemistry?"

—The Simpsons, "Sideshow Bob Roberts" (10/9/94)

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By now almost everyone's heard about the latest in a series of stories involving violence in Baltimore City schools. This past Sunday, a pair of 13-year-old boys broke into Calverton Elementary/Middle School, ransacked several rooms and tried to sexually assault one of the assistant principals.

There's not a lot to say about this, really. The public response from the school, Central Office, the Union and the Mayor's Office has run anywhere between tepid and the usual hand-wringing, but in the end I doubt that much is going to happen.

Union President Marietta English has advised teachers not to put themselves in a position to leave the building after dark. Nice advice, Mari. Did you see the part of the story where this took place at 3:30 PM?

Mayor Dixon's representative was quoted in the Sun as saying that there are limitations to what the city can do: "We can't say, 'Here's the new policy.' We can't say, 'Here is the new deployment policy for police in the schools.' ... What we can do is work with the school system and offer any assistance that they are asking for." I hope that's not the same sort of assistance you're giving the Arabbers, and way to screw THEM over, by the way, Ms. Mayor.

The thing that disturbs me is that the teachers knew there was a break-in—and really, how could they not, given the state of the rooms and offices that were affected?—but until Tuesday afternoon, nobody among school staff knew that a staff member had been assaulted. Until it broke on the news, practically no parents were aware that anything had happened.

For the most part, Calverton Elementary/Middle School has been the "innocent bystander" in this neighborhood. It basically marks the line between the Bloods and the Crips, and consequently is the heart of a turf war. When the lockdowns took place there a few weeks ago, it was because of activity OUTSIDE the school that didn't necessarily involve students. Now the violence is starting to move inside.

The school called a staff meeting at the end of the day today, and people were advised to keep the rumors to a minimum. Marjorie Miles, the principal, advised people to leave the school in groups. I guess if you're in the middle of a group, you're only one of several potential targets. I'm not sure what the logic entails there. But the fact is that nobody in the building feels safe anymore, and they don't feel as though anyone really wants to help. You can still see broken glass on the floor inside the office where the students broke in, and there's still fingerprint dust all over the room, because the custodians haven't bothered to clean any of it up. This despite several requests by the person who occupies the office.

Something I don't get is the rather poor response on the part of the parents. Why aren't more of them angry? Why aren't more of them banging on the doors at North Avenue, demanding answers or, at the very least, transfers? Their children's lives are in danger! Here's a quick idea: why not get the preschool programs and the elementary-level kids OFF THE FIRST FLOOR OF THE BUILDING?

And why aren't more teachers furious about the situation they've been thrust into? Their lives are hanging in the balance! Why are they taking it like sheep?

There was a time, in the days of the Roman Empire, when a citizen could walk throughout the known world without fear of being accosted simply because they carried the designation: Civis Romanus; "I am a Roman Citizen". It was universally understood that retribution would be swift and certain. Why haven't the police moved into this neighborhood like the Wrath of God Himself and rendered it untenable for these gangs? Doesn't discouraging this sort of activity do anything toward making the neighborhood a better place?

I honest to god don't get it anymore.

On the Plus Side

Fred Gailey: Look Doris, someday you're going to find that your way of facing this realistic world just doesn't work. And when you do, don't overlook those lovely intangibles. You'll discover those are the only things that are worthwhile.

—Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

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This is an extension of a comment I made on Epiphany's blog.

When I was working in New York schools, which happened between 1985 up until a few weeks before 9/11 (and with that two-year break at Record World), I worked in a few different places:

• Most of that time, I worked in a nonpublic school with severely- and profoundly-impaired youngsters, aged 5-21. We're talking one step away from an institution. I had kids who were fifteen years old, who were functionally nonverbal. They were two-year-olds in grown bodies.
• I was a substitute teacher in New York City for almost a year. Most of the classes I worked in were special education classes, and most of the schools were in the Queens neighborhood of South Ozone Park. PS 63Q was my "cash cow"; I got a lot of work there. The other one was the nearby middle school, IS 210. Lemme tell you, they fed the teachers well in 210's cafeteria. 
• I worked in a very small private high school in Manhattan for a year. My biggest class was five students. Most of these kids had serious money. A girl in my homeroom is now worth around $200 million.
• After that I spent about two years in the preschool program at Helen Keller Services for the Blind in Brooklyn.

So you see, I was either forgettable, or my students were so impaired that they wouldn't remember me today.

After my second marriage fell apart, a friend of mine suggested that I come down to Baltimore. They're looking for people here, she told me. My concern was that I didn't want to leave New York to have the same job I could have up there. She told me that I could work as an Instructional Associate, and she told me what the job entailed: basically, I would coordinate the crafting of the educational programs for the special ed students in a school. It sounded like exactly what I wanted to do, and here's why:

When I attended the IEP meetings for the Helen Keller students, I was given two tasks: write the progress report and develop the academic goals for the students. When I was asked to attend the meeting (which wasn't the case every time for my students; many times someone else from the school attended in my place), my participation was practically nil unless I made a point of injecting myself into the conversation. More often than not, we'd go to the meeting and someone would stick a document under the parents' noses and say, "Sign here." There was very little discussion of the student's program, the school they'd attend, the educational setting, anything. And this is what the parent is being asked to sign to. It made me pretty crazy, and coming to Baltimore seemed like an antidote. It was a way of "putting right what once went wrong" (bonus points if you can ID that quotation) and ensuring that bad IEPs weren't getting shoved down parents' throats.

So now that I'm in Baltimore, my contact with the students is a little more limited. Although many of them know my name, it's not as though they're forming fond student/teacher memories of me that they'll carry through their lives. However, there are plenty of times when I'll be at a meeting that seems to go on for EVER (and some of them do take several hours), and we go through what seems like a million details, and we walk out of the building trying to remember what sunshine looks like, and we know that we've put together a great document that truly has the student's best interests at heart; an educational plan that really seems to get this kid, and if all goes well then we've laid down the foundation for another great plan next year. And the parent who came into the meeting with the "Don't think you're going to blow smoke up my butt" attitude and the one with the "What lies are you going to tell me this year?" snarl leaves the school thanking us for our work, because we're the first team that truly heard what they have to say.

So when we get all of the other stress and grief and tsouris and the just-plain-bullshit from North Avenue and other Bigger Paychecks Than Ours, we think back on moments like those and remember that it's the things like that that make it worthwhile.

The Gestalt of Things

Prosecutor: What about that tattoo on your chest? Doesn't it say "Die Bart Die"?
Sideshow Bob: No, that's German...
[unveils tattoo]
Sideshow Bob: ...for "The Bart, The".
Parole Board Member: No one who speaks German could be an evil man.

—The Simpsons, "Cape Feare" (10/7/93)

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Last week, at the Board of Education meeting, Dr. Alonso unveiled his plan for streamlining things at North Avenue and various related offices which aren't located there. He also discussed changes to the way that principals will run their schools, essentially giving them more autonomy with hiring and budget. You can find the details of most of that information here. All of this is pending Board of Ed approval at their next meeting, and then the City Council also has to approve it a couple of days later.

The next day there was a meeting of all Central Office Special Education staff at North Avenue, called by Idalyn Hauss. I wasn't specifically supposed to go—technically I don't rank quite that high—but my boss was supposed to be out for the week and I was covering his meetings. He got wind of the meeting and decided to come back early. I, now having a gap in my schedule, decided to attend anyway. As it happens, I wasn't the only person there who wasn't supposed to be, but more on that anon.

I'd never seen all of BCPSS' Special Ed people in one place before. I hadn't realized how many there were. There were about a hundred people in that room, probably more. Who knew!

The first thing that Ms. Hauss said was that it was going to take some time to get used to the gestalt of the new organization. We were told that the structure for the reorganization was going to be in place for at least two years. We were also told that of the hundreds of positions that were getting cut, only 36 of them were in Special Education. My feeling is, had there not been a Consent Decree, that would have been a much larger number. Not all of those 36 positions were currently staffed, so it didn't mean that 36 people were being reassigned. However, once Board approval comes through, she said she'd speak to the affected people individually.

And this is the heart of it: the key is not to fire people but to reassign them back into schools. Naturally, this could entail a pay cut, so the people involved have to decide whether they want to remain or not. The bottom line, we were told, is that there's a lot of churning, a lot of upheaval, a lot of change. If you want to be "safe" and away from all that, working in a school is where you want to be. If you like a little excitement in your life, try Central Office.

Another thing that struck me as important is that the position of Educational Specialist is being "zeroed out". This means that, basically, all of the current Ed Specialists have to re-apply for their jobs. If you've read my particular brand of tripe long enough, you'll recall that this is the job that I'd applied for and didn't get. I'm not so upset about being passed over, just now. But it also means that I have a new shot at it. This fact is important because, as Idalyn Hauss explained, all of the IEP Team Associates' jobs were safe for now, although this year the principals get to choose their own ITAs. I'm pretty good at my job, otherwise I wouldn't be the Lead ITA for my area, so I'm not worried about that part. There are plenty of principals who would like me to work in their school. But...

I raised my hand. Ms. Hauss spotted me, acknowledged me, then asked, "What are you doing here?" I wasn't getting into the whole thing so I simply said that I thought I was covering for my boss, who was sitting right next to me. Then I asked about the Lead ITAs and where they fit into this whole scheme.

The truth was, I already knew the answer when I asked. I just wanted to see what she'd say. There was a pause, then she said only that the ITAs would still be around. In short, the Leads don't fit into the current model.

Without sounding too much like I'm scrambling to keep my job, let me tell you why this isn't necessarily a good thing. Lead ITAs work longer hours than regular ITAs. They have a caseload, so they still have a foot in the school and a good handle on what's going on there. They're treated like Area Office staff, even though they have no more on-paper authority than the Kindergarten teacher down the hall. But as a result of this, they probably have a better handle on what's going on in the schools than anyone else, because everyone talks to them: principals, ITAs, teachers, support staff, you name it. Lead ITAs get a lot of information and, if they have half a brain, can genuinely see the bigger picture in a school.

There have been numerous times when I've been able to use this information to help my boss. He's gotten all pissed off at certain people and I have to put the brakes on: "Wait a minute. She's not getting this done because the principal this and the special education teacher that and the parent the other thing. This person is going crazy because she desperately wants to get the job done and she isn't getting the support she needs." More than once, this has led to his writing a memo to remind principals that thus-and-such needs to be taken care of.

And the beauty part of all this insight is that it doesn't cost the city an extra dime. I work longer hours, do more intensive and varied work, and I don't get paid any extra for it. So in my head, losing the Leads? Bad, bad idea.

Ah well...plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Andrès and Me

Lt. Pug: Are there any questions? [EVERYONE raises their hand] Good! Since there are no questions...

—101 Dalmatians: The Series (1997)

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Last week, all of the IEP Team Associates were gathered in one place for staff development. First on the agenda was the Baltimore City CEO, Dr. Andrès Alonso, who was there to address the group and take questions.

Many of us viewed this as a rather welcome thing, as there have been constant rumors going about with regard to our jobs and how the system is going to run next year. Those who read Inside Ed at the Sun's website know that there have been a great number of sudden departures from the system and there's always speculation as to whether someone who recently retired jumped, or was pushed, off that cliff.

For the record, the answers are: "Jumped", "jumped", "pushed", "pushed", "saw the handwriting on the wall and jumped", and "pushed so hard that there are handprints in their ribs". (I'll leave it to you to figure out who's who.)

The downside to this little session is that he was being held to exactly an hour. Now, an hour would be plenty in most situations, but the fact is that Alonso loves to hear his own voice. I don't really have another explanation for this. In that hour's space, he answered exactly FIVE questions, spending at least ten minutes on each one. At then end of the hour there were at least a dozen hands in the air, and mine was one of them.

Alonso couldn't answer one of the questions put to him, but he managed to do ten minutes on it anyway, then deferred to Idalyn Hauss, who answered it for him in about nine seconds. With one exception, all of his responses were monologues. For the remaining question, an ITA posed a problem to him and he asked her for a possible solution. She started to respond by restating the problem and he asked her again for her solution. This went around a couple of times before she got around to coming up with some sort of answer. To be fair, he did say early on (not in these words) that he didn't want the Q&A to be simply undifferentiated complaining; that if a problem was cited he'd like to hear a solution. But the bottom line is that when he spends ten minutes answering a question he's already acknowledged he can't answer, you're talking about a person who talks a lot and says little.

Unfortunately, that's what we wound up with in the end. No rumors were put to rest, nobody felt a whole lot safer in their jobs (in fact, several people walked out thinking they were going to lose their jobs before much longer), and while he acknowledged how tough it was and how much responsibility was involved, I didn't get the feeling that we were going to get much more support from North Avenue. I can only hope I'm wrong.

What It's About

Lt. Col. Frank Slade: You break my heart, son. All my life I've stood up to everyone and everything because it made me feel important. You do it...because you mean it. You've got integrity, Charlie. I don't know whether to shoot you or adopt ya.
Charlie Simms: Not much of a choice, is it, Sir?

—Scent of a Woman (1992)
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This week I either ran, or attended, no fewer than eight Special Education meetings. That's a lot for anyone to deal with, especially six of the ones I chaired, because I was filling in for someone and had to get familiar with the cases quickly, so I'd have some idea of what I was talking about. 

But one meeting in particular stood out for me this week, because it was so tough, and so complex. Without violating too much confidentiality, I think it's safe to say that this student was at the center of a ten-year custody battle between her parents that finally ended (we all hope) this past September, when she was returned to the parent who was supposed to have her. During the interim, there were all kinds of allegations of all kinds of abuse and moving around and missing lots of school and god-knows-whatever-else. It was one of the most depressing case folders I've had to review.

So I went to the school awhile back to do a formal observation on this girl, and considering her past and the attendant behavioral issues I'd heard about, she was actually pretty well-behaved in the classroom, especially given the events that took place in the room on that day. (Sorry about the vagueness, but that's how it has to go sometimes.) But when the team met this week to discuss her case and update her education plan, I went to the meeting, knowing that it was going to be a long, complicated meeting with a lot of material to review and a lot of details in this student's plan.

And I was right in that respect: the meeting went for about five hours, including a 25-minute break in the middle. And the more I heard about this kid, the  tougher things got. By the time we got through, I wanted to scoop up this little girl and take her home and give her Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup and about two weeks' worth of hugs. But we slogged through everything and put together a document that, I hope, will give this youngster a fighting chance at a decent future.

And that's why I do what I do.

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. 

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. 

I C U B C P S S

Nicky Santoro: Peek-a-boo, you fucks, you!

—Casino (1995)

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Despite my needling Sara Neufeld about her article the other day, I do have to admit that her linking to this site produced more traffic than I've seen in awhile. I got triple the usual number of hits. Not that you'd know it based on the comment section, but who am I to complain. Anyway, thanks to Sara for that little boost.

I, like so many others who have this ugly little habit of blogging, have a habit of looking at my stats. At this point it's kind of a morbid curiosity, to see what kind of sick minds are doing weird searches. I don't get the stuff that Yellojkt has, with the naked teen idols, but I do get some stuff. (BTW Yello: your attempt to poison my well hasn't worked. Sorry.)

(Oh, and Confidential to the person looking to do Special Education work from home: email me if you want that URL.)

In addition to search terms, I'm also able to track back my visitors. For instance, I know that one person came here from France. Another couple of hits came from America Online users. And, in the last two days, no fewer than twenty-one hits came from the Baltimore City Public School System's IP address.

That's pretty curious, if only because Typepad-generated webpages are blocked by BCPSS' filtering software. BCPSS employees shouldn't be able to see it. So either there are computers out there that aren't subject to the blocking software, or (more likely) BCPSS has a proxy server that they're using to get past the blocking software. In either case, it's interesting that there are people who actually have the time and inclination to read this bit of drivel.

Anyway, for the sake of those people at BCPSS who are peeking in today, I took the liberty of delaying the appearance of this post until just before noon. This way the pixels will still be fresh when you read them over your lunch. Because I know you're not reading this on work time, no sir-ree.   

Same As The Old Boss--In My Case, Anyway

[Maya is the only one in costume at the office]
Maya Gallo: That memo about dressing up, I'm the only one who got it, aren't I?
Dennis Finch: By the way, you got another letter from corporate. Next week is Topless Tuesdays.

—Just Shoot Me, "The Mask" (10/27/98)

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So here's the news I've been foreshadowing the past couple of days. A press release was sent via email to BCPSS employees around 5:30 pm yesterday (nice timing, that), indicating that, per Board approval--which happened later that evening--Irma Johnson was named Executive Director of Elementary/Elementary Middle Schools.

The other move they made was appointing Michael Sarbanes as "Executive Director of Partnerships, Communication and Community Engagement". I met him during his mayoral campaign, and GF actually did a little campaign work for him, but the fact is that the Sun, in putting his appointment first in the newspaper story (and Sara? You need more verbs in the third paragraph. I'm just saying.), missed the bigger picture.

The Elementary and Elementary/Middle Schools in Baltimore City are currently broken into four groups of 20-25 schools each, known as "Areas". The areas were geographic in nature up until about 2001, then they were split based on mysterious criteria. Last year, they were reorganized so that Areas 1 and 4 were strictly Elementary, while Areas 2 and 3 were all K-8 schools. Irma Johnson was the Area Academic Officer for Area 1 (and my boss' boss, therefore my boss as well). Now she's the director of ALL 93 SCHOOLS in Areas 1 through 4.

The upshot of this is that, ultimately, all of the schools with Elementary or Middle students (with the exception of the Middle-only schools) now come under her jurisdiction. This means that the areas themselves will wind up getting rearranged into one big area. Since Ms. Johnson works with my boss, and my boss works with me, all of our boats have floated a little bit higher organizationally. Good news in that, but it also means that without some serious coordination, we're also going to be working much harder. Fortunately, my boss is the sort of guy who excels at that sort of thing.

At some point between now and the end of the year (I presume), offices are going to have to be moved about to consolidate all the areas into a single location. Since Areas 1 and 4 are already together, the likelihood is that 2 and 3 will come to where we are (at the Lake Clifton campus). Frankly, I think all four areas should commandeer a corner of the Professional Development Center on Northern Parkway, where we can tailor a space to some very specific needs.

Any way you look at it, there are big changes ahead. It sounds crazy but I'm rather looking forward to it. 

Shuffling Along

Philip: Just remember that in every pothole there is hope. Well, you see, pothole is spelled P-O-T-H-O-L-E. So if you take the P, and add it to the H, the O, and the E, and rearrange the letters... or contrariwise, you remove the O, T, and the L, you get "hope". So, just remember, in every pothole there is hope!

—Mixed Nuts (1994)

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The other night I attended the PTA meeting at Woodhome Elementary/Middle School, which is where Wee One attends. As it happened, Dr. Alonso was scheduled to come as a guest speaker. When we got there, however, it turned out that he was running late, so they filled the time with some of the usual PTA agenda stuff. The assembled parents then turned the discussion over to the problems that the school has been having with the heat. Wee One hadn't said anything about it, so GF and I were both caught by surprise.

Apparently they've been working on the heat and air-conditioning system since the summer. They get it working in one part of the building and it dies in another. Apparently the radiator/vent units in the rooms can't stand the new boilers, etc. Anyway, they're having trouble with it and everyone is frustrated. The meeting basically went in the same circles for about 35 minutes. Finally they moved on to some other excitement, such as the Treasurer's report.

That's when Dr. Alonso arrived. So we got to do another ten minutes of the heat in the building, which ended with his promise to at least figure out what it would take to genuinely get the system working for the entire building.

Then someone asked him about the recent departures of Area Academic Officers and the failure to replace them, and how it was launching rumors of big changes in the organization of the school system's Central Office. He cut right to the chase on that one, saying "Oh, those aren't rumors" and noting that much of the change goes back to the fact that the school system is facing a $50 million shortfall because of the hijinks in Annapolis. So BCPSS has to cut back while at the same time making sure that as much money as possible goes to the schools themselves. The overall feel was that people shouldn't worry about their jobs specifically, but that doesn't mean that they won't find that their position has been changed. He noted some disappointment with the current percentage of teachers who are "highly qualified" as defined by the No Child Left Behind Act, and that there are many highly qualified people who are now at North Avenue. His reply to the question basically drew some applause.

On Friday I met with my boss, who'd recently met with his boss, and it's true that there are HUGE organizational changes coming. It's not official yet (I guess it'll come out at the next Board meeting on Tuesday?), so I won't divulge any more details. However, the upshot of it is that in a very short time I'm probably going to be very busy.

Reactionary Mess

Tanya Kirbuk: Tell me, Dr. Floyd, what has happened to American bravery?
Dr. Heywood Floyd: [irritated] It's alive and well, thank you. What happened to Russian common sense?

—2010 (1984)

------------------------

Shortly before the break I was talking to my boss about these data cleansing reports that we've been sharing with schools. Part of the issue is that the problems that appear on the reports, once they're resolved, still take 24-48 hours to drop off the report. In fact, some of them have been known to linger for anywhere between three and five days before they drop off the reports.

Some of these reports have been going out on a daily basis. My argument was (and remains) that sending them out this often just winds up irritating people. It's almost like a suggestion that people aren't taking care of the problems. In my area, this is not the case at all, especially when I go through a couple of days of reviewing the reports. A student who appears more than once invariably catches my attention. (Special Education is a relatively small universe in BCPSS, so you notice when you see names repeatedly.) However, he's under instructions from his boss, the Area Academic Officer, to send them out every day so that's the way it goes.

But here's the other thing: Dr. Alonso is intent on getting BCPSS out from under this Consent Decree that we've been under since Lord Baltimore's kid was in Special Education, and I certainly applaud him for that. But threats on the principals' jobs is basically putting a lot of pressure on them, who in turn are putting a lot of pressure on the IEP Team Associates, who may or may not be able to do anything about the problem data. (Or, if they've already done something about it, there are often suggestions that they haven't.)

I don't have a problem with the whole Data Cleansing thing; I think that it's important that we review these reports and stay on top of things. But the other thing that disturbs me is when we hear that Dr. Alonso doesn't want to see more than some given number of errors for a school, or else there will be consequences. This is foolish for numerous reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the data is dynamic. Schools have meetings for their special education students every week. This means that many times, a school may have, say, three errors to correct this week, which they get cleared up. However, then another bunch of meetings will take place next week, which could launch another batch of errors to be cleaned up. Larger schools which have lots of meetings in a given week will go through this sort of thing constantly. So they'll have some number of errors to take care of, but it's not the same problems that aren't being taken care of; it's a new set of problems that replaced the old ones. As long as everyone's got it covered, this should represent a problem to nobody. Simply going by the hard numbers isn't going to give anyone the whole picture. And to penalize anyone, based only on the numbers, is just plain nonsensical.    

The Get-Along Gang

Darren MacElroy: Banned for life. That's a long time.

--Blades of Glory (2007)

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Yesterday I had quite the early day. I agreed to help a principal with staff development, on a topic that by all rights she should have been doing herself. But, I figured that it was a decent opportunity to get to know some of the teachers in that school, so I took it on.

Getting there (or anywhere) at 7:30 is a drag for me. I'm definitely a night-owl type and am most productive in the late afternoon, shortly after school ends. I usually get a lot more done between 3:00 and 5:00 than I do the rest of the day. Of course, I'm also not dealing with people strolling into my office. But, I am a trouper, so I made the trek and did my bit, which as far as I can tell went pretty well.

A while later I had to go to another school to attend a meeting as the Area Representative. The team was preparing to write an educational program that would send the student to a special program in another building. When I reviewed the materials that were given to me, there was only a psychological report from another school and not much else. Peculiar, I thought. When I entered the special ed office, the ITA (the person who runs the meeting) told me that she'd done some informal assessments on the student and that she was going to combine that information, plus some of the information from the report they already had, into an educational assessment report.

"OK, great," I said. "Where is it?"

When you get a sentence of any kind that begins "I was gonna..." you know it's trouble. But part of this came about when I was told that she'd spoken to my boss and that he was aware that she was writing this report, etc. So now I'm in a weird place. I'm pretty sure it would NOT be OK that this report isn't ready at the beginning of the meeting, but I'm not sure what he'd told her. I excused myself from the room and called him up. I let him know that the report wasn't ready, but fortunately (at the time) the parents weren't there and the meeting was supposed to have begun already. The short version of his response: no report, no meeting. After hanging up, I thought maybe she was just wrapping up the report and I was being a little hasty.

I returned to the office and most of the team had assembled at that point. (By that point, the meeting should have started ten minutes earlier.) I sat down again and looked at the screen that the ITA was working on.

She'd just started writing the report.

I said to the principal, who'd just sat next to me, "I think we need to postpone this meeting."

She replied, "You're kidding."

Annoyed, I pointed to my face: "Is this my 'kidding' face? This team isn't ready for this meeting." (I admit this was a little snotty.) When she asked what I was talking about, so I gave her more detail.

Here's the thing: this person made arrangements for someone from the Area Office to come out and attend this meeting. When it came down to the meeting itself, she, and therefore the team, wasn't prepared to hold the meeting. We can't do this without all of the necessary reports, and I wasn't going to wait around for this person to whip out over an hour's worth of typing in fifteen minutes so that she could produce a substandard report. Basically, this one person wound up wasting several people's time. I offered up a nice, glossed-over version of all this and added, "The only saving grace is that the parents aren't here."

That's when someone said, "Um, the dad is waiting in the main office."

Oh, well, then.

So after calling my boss about it (and his backing me up), the ITA went into the office and apologized and basically took the blame for the team not being able to hold the meeting. While she was out the principal gave me a "talking-to". She didn't appreciate the way I said all this, she didn't like the face thing, I should have taken her aside privately instead of just blurting out in the open room like that, etc.

Now, I took her point, even if I didn't necessarily agree with it completely. And I did explain my side, and I apologized. And I think that's all important, especially to this story. Because I did appreciate her taking the time to talk to me about it right away, and I said so. I had one time when I didn't even know that someone had a problem and later on it turned into a Big Fricken Deal before I even knew what was going on. So when I left the building, in my head it was an incident that was pretty much a done deal.

Later on, I got an email from my boss that took me off the re-scheduled meeting. Part of the email read, "We need to talk.     You are no longer welcome back at [the school].   I could say more, but I am too disappointed to do so. "

So now I'm a little pissed off that there was STILL a problem despite my effort to clear the air and thinking that we're done. But I'm also a little pissed off that my boss is warming up to pull the "more in sorrow than in anger/wounded puppy" routine. You know what? I screwed up. If you want to write me up, write me up. If you want to put me on a Performance Improvement Plan, fine. Do that. But I am not going to put up with a martyr.

And I'm also pretty irritated that he didn't CONTINUE to back me up afterward, because the bottom line is that, if he'd been there in the first place, he would have said much the same thing to the team (except the "face" part). And you can bet that nobody's going to say he can't come back. If I'm there as his representative, the team there should just eat it.

So yeah, I can't wait till Friday when we get to talk. We need to talk, alright, but I hope he doesn't expect a one-sided conversation.    

Lead in the Water = Job Security for Me

Homer: Kids, kids. I'm not going to die. That only happens to bad people.
Bart: What about Abraham Lincoln?
Homer: Uh, he sold poison milk to school children.

--The Simpsons, "Homer's Triple Bypass" (12/17/92)

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OK, I admit it. That was a pretty dark headline.

You may have seen the news that Baltimore City Schools is finally bailing out (heh) on abating the lead in the water fountains. This is a pretty good idea, considering that in many cases the lead wasn't coming from anywhere within the school itself.

For instance, I worked at Cecil Elementary a few years back. During the 2001-2 school year, that building was under comprehensive renovation. I mean, they gutted the place down to a shell and started over. New everything, everywhere. I loved working in that building. And James Drummond, the principal at the time, has been promoted into the Area Office, so I'm working for him again, which is a pretty cool deal. (He's not my direct boss, but still.) But the point is that, except for the exterior brick, we're talking about a brand-new school.

And yet, when they did the comprehensive testing a year or so later, the fountains failed the tests. As near as anyone could figure, it's because the pipes OUTSIDE the building were contaminated. (And thank goodness they're replacing all the water mains in that neighborhood.) The custodians went through a few strategies to make things better, most of which involved flushing all the fixtures in the building for about five minutes each day. This apparently does the trick. The building then became one of the schools to pass the subsequent tests.

However, as an article in today's Baltimore Sun notes,the total costs of these strategies, which includes the cycle of testing and lab fees and staff to oversee the testing (but doesn't count things like the man-hours needed to run all the fixtures in every building for five minutes, or the cost of the water that's simply running down the drain during this process) was comparable to the cost of just putting water coolers in all the buildings. So it was a smart decision on Dr. Alonso's part.

What's amusing to me, as someone who works for BCPSS, is that the press release that went out on this yesterday was at least the third draft. Many of these things go out to the BCPSS system as a whole via email, separately from whenever the press gets ahold of it. For those of you who don't know, when Microsoft Outlook (which is what BCPSS uses for mail handling) is connected to a central mail server, there's a function called "recall" which allows you to cancel the sending of an email. However, it doesn't really prevent the person at the other end from reading an email if they happen to have Outlook open at the time the bad email is sent. So I was able to see that the message went out twice, and was recalled twice, before it finally went out for good. Here's an idea: proofread, THEN hit the "Send" button. 

Another note to BCPSS spies reading this: If you're going to circulate a message like this, you should probably send it as a PDF rather than a Word document, because now everyone in the city has a scanned copy of Dr. Alonso's signature that they can separate from the press release. An unscupulous person could conceivably write any kind of memo now, and put Dr. Alonso's signature on it.

Um...in theory.

Stage Fright

Lou Grant: Where do you get off changing Murray's copy?
Ted Baxter: It was flat, Lou! I didn't change the facts, I just jazzed up the language.
Lou Grant: Jazzed up? Jazzed up? Ted, you do not change the wording of a direct quote. And I do not believe that the Queen of England calls the French Ambassador "The Dude from Frog Town."

--The Mary Tyler Moore Show, "Two Wrongs Don't Make A Writer" (2/23/74)

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Working out of the area office has some good points and some bad points. From the "good" standpoint, there's the fact that there's not a lot of predictability and get to travel all over the city to help out other Special Ed teams. On the other hand, I can never count on any two days being at all alike and I have to drive all over the damn place to tell people things that five extra seconds of thinking might have revealed.

OK, that's off my chest, now. One of the things that I actually enjoy doing is staff development. It's something that I'm definitely good at, and the satisfaction surveys back me up on this. And, as someone who's technically area staff (as opposed to school-based, even though I do carry a caseload of my own), I'm getting called on to do more staff development involving principals. This, too, can be a double-edged sword.

First, I'm definitely not principal-level, so it can be a little weird telling them what they need to do. It's also clear that some of them resent it, but there's not much I can do about it. The other thing, however, is that I have to do this stuff pretty much in tandem with my boss. What's wrong with that is that he's a little on the obsessive-compulsive side. And by "a little" I mean that we'll spend all day tomorrow tinkering with the presentation part of this thing we're doing in the afternoon. I've already gotten emails over the weekend about this, asking for changes that I'm resistant to make.

The other thing that goes wrong with presenting with him is that I'm often told that I'm going to spend a lot of time doing a given section, and then, because he can be kind of long-winded, I wind up not doing anything at all, which means that the preparation I did in order to speak goes for naught. It's pretty annoying when I'm technically off the clock and on my own time while I'm doing this.

There's an old joke about two people in a restaurant. One complains that the food is awful. The other one says "Yes, and the portions are so small!" Sometimes I feel like I'm in that realm. I go up before a tough crowd, but not nearly enough.

Running On Ice

Oerstadt: I told you earlier I have a destiny, a purpose. Satan reasons like man, but God thinks of eternity. Well, I prostrate myself before a world that's going to hell in a handbag, 'cause in all eternity, I am here and I will be remembered. That's destiny. A bomb has a destiny, a predetermined fate set by the hand of its creator, and anyone who tries to alter that destiny will be destroyed.

—Deja Vu (2006)

---------------------------

I've had two pretty crappy days at work this week. I don't know that it's going to improve any. Yesterday I went into the office and there was a bunch of turmoil going on. There was a city-wide meeting of principals going on, after which they would break up into their area-based groups for further inservicing. Nobody knew whether they were going to be presenting any of the materials to the principal, or if they were just going to assist homehow, or what. My boss goes into Overdrive Mode and has me edit an existing PowerPoint presentation with the relevant material, plus he grabs another couple of people to put together a folder full of handouts, a pre/post test for the staff development end of things, and a few other details. All of this because nobody bothered to tell him whether or not he was presenting any of this material. He and I worked from about 10 am until after 2:00 putting the whole thing together. I have to say, we did a pretty good job. However, at about the time we were ready to leave, the AAO calls my boss and tells him that his sole responsibility is to deal with the pre- and post-tests. However, she'll also need some help on the PowerPoint. I look in the closet and see all of the projectors are there. So I grab a projector and an extension cord, and all the materials that we were given by North Avenue last week. Pack it onto a folding hand truck and take it to the elevator.

Which is, naturally, out of order.

So I have to get this hand truck of stuff, which includes a $1500 digital projector, down three flights of stairs. Fun!

The presentation was taking place at the Professional Development Center, which, after a couple of years' absence, has returned to the building at 2500 Northern Parkway. This part is a pretty sweet deal for me, because I live practically walking distance from this place. I get to PDC and it turns out that I didn't have to bring the projector; they have these training rooms now which have PCs connected to projectors mounted to the ceiling. The images get projected onto this smart board jobbie to which you can take a stylus, and it basically acts like a big tablet PC. You can click on an item projected on the board  and have the computer react appropriately.

So I spent four hours working on a presentation that didn't get used, went to a building to be the guy who helps the guy who's handing out and collecting quizzes, plus running the presentation stuff because nobody else can figure it out. Not the most productive use of my time. This part was all after school hours, incidentally: I got home at 6:00. And I therefore didn't get to work on the presentation I KNOW I'm doing next week because of all this.

And this is all because our new AAO wouldn't return her phone calls over the weekend, or during the day Monday until literally the last minute. In short, we spent a bunch of time making her look good that day and I have no real feeling that our efforts were truly appreciated.

Today, I had a very long IEP meeting at a school, which I can't talk too much about (confidentiality and all that), but the short version is that I got sandbagged into the team making a decision that I think is inappropriate for this student at this time. The team, I'm sure, is more than happy not to have to deal with this parent anymore as a result of this decision. Not to mention her advocate, who figured he could discuss medication because he works in a pharmacy. Naturally I took the time to ask, and of course he's not a pharmacist. "But I've worked in a pharmacy for fifteen years."

Like that carried any weight for me. I could spend fifteen years in a garage but that wouldn't make me a Corvette.

The only bright spot on my horizon is that I have a meeting tomorrow afternoon that will practically guarantee that I'll get home at a decent hour.   

You Go, Boy

Huey Freeman: They gon' fire you.
Mr. Uberwitz: For what?
Huey Freeman: For being an irresponsible white person.

--The Boondocks, "A Huey Freeman Christmas" (12/28/05)

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If you're following what's been going on in Baltimore City Schools recently, you know that the system has a new CEO. Dr. Andres Alonso took the job with the proviso that he got to run things his way, and he's certainly been doing that. With the exception of the Baltimore Teachers Union activists, the press on him has been pretty good so far, and it looks like he's really in to ensure success in the system.

The flip side of this is that Dr. Alonso is wasting no time in looking for things to happen. If you read Epiphany's blog, or the education blog over at the Baltimore Sun's website then you know that there are stories, both true and untrue, floating about with regard to Dr. Alonso's ruthlessness about this sort of thing. Pretty much anyone who's in an administrative position in Baltimore City Public Schools works at the pleasure of the CEO and the Board of Education, and his stance is: perform, or be fired.

Part of my job (which is BTU level) is to assist people in schools with Special Education issues. There's a person in each school called the IEP Team Associate, whose job it is to schedule the annual review meetings for the Special Ed students, hold the meetings, ensure that the students are getting their services, and enter the appropriate data into the appropriate system. (There are actually four computer systems we need to deal with: one to handle the education programs, one to track the services, one for students who need transportation and one which maintains the records for all  of the students in BCPSS. The information in this one populates some of the data in the others.)

With so much data to handle, there's a lot of room for errors where information in one system doesn't match what's in another system. So one of the things I get to do is assist schools with their "Data Cleansing." I'm able to run reports to help determine whether information in the system may be incorrect, analyze that information and help out with getting it straightened out.

Data Cleansing started last spring as a gigantic push to ensure that there were as few errors as possible before we converted a lot of this information into a single database. When the company which was supposed to put this thing together fell apart, we were left with several stopgap measures, but the data cleansing project continued.  Because, after all, the data's supposed to be correct anyway. When we started DC there were literally thousands of errors systemwide, most of them the result of typos that were easily fixed. As spring moved toward summer, it became clear that there were going to be some errors that simply couldn't be cleaned up for one reason or another. There were a couple of glitches in the system that meant that a problem just had to kind of stay out there in cyberspace forever. North Avenue was aware that this was the case and the matter would be dropped. When school started up again in August, we continued generating reports and fixing data, but because we weren't under the pressure of a drop-dead date (you know, the one that never materialized. Not that that's anyone's fault), it wasn't quite so bad dealing with stuff. 

With Alonso at the helm, however, DC has become an intensive project again. Dr. Alonso has told principals that they can get their data straightened out or they can clean out their desks. This, in turn, has a lot of principals running scared and there's a tremendous level of pressure being exerted on the IEP Team Associates by the principals as well as my office. We're constantly calling, offering help with the data cleansing, and the principals are all "Hey, why isn't this problem fixed?" And it doesn't necessarily help that, once you fix a problem, it takes anywhere from 24-48 hours for the different systems to talk to one another and catch up with the fixes. Not much you can do there; it's the way the system works. But it makes principals nervous to hear "I fixed it" and when they run the report the problem's still there.

Not to mention those occasional problems that are just going to hang out there forever, or until the appropriate patch is written, or whatever. People are getting a little crazy because the reports aren't absolutely pristine. But you know what? This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The data needs to be straightened out, the pressure needs to be on, and this all should have happened over twenty years ago. The Consent Decree is one of those things that weighs heavily on the shoulders of the system, and it's good to see that Dr. Alonso is committed to getting us out from under it, rather than either paying it lip service or viewing it as something to be endured, as so many before him have done.

While I Was Out

Helen Stewart: My officers are trained professionals.
Nikki Wade: Well, if Fenner's anything to go by, you'd be better off training chimpanzees.

—Bad Girls (1999)

-----------------------------

GF came through the surgery well. It actually took longer to get her anesthetized than it did for the procedure itself, and she was discharged several hours later. Scientific progress!

When I went to work on Thursday, I had to present a staff development session that I'd taken the time to re-write, since the materials they gave me were just so awful. Although I got there early in order to set up my room, I nearly didn't get it all together on time because of people doing one, or both, of two things: 1) asking about GF, and 2) telling me how bad the previous day's session was.

Obviously I can't comment on that, because I wasn't there, but I do know this. Many of the people who presented this material had expressed that they weren't comfortable with it because they weren't familiar with the stuff they were talking about. This concern basically went ignored. The second thing was that they wanted a script to work from. The person who developed that particular aspect of the training was very resistant to writing scripts, because it tends to lead to cookie-cutter work. In general I tend to agree with this, but that doesn't mean that I didn't set myself up with a solid list of talking points. I don't really think these people even had that. The other thing was that the topic was a comparison of the old computer system vs. the new one. There's a serious paradigm shift involved here (hence the presenters' discomfort), and the product is deeply entwined with the process. The hope was that the morning session would be about process, and the afternoon about product. As I understand it, they spent so much time trying to separate the two that few people learned anything.

Whenever we do these staff development sessions, participants are asked to complete satisfaction surveys. I do get to see them although they are anonymous. Usually they're positive when talking about me and my co-presenters; occasionally the subject material, or some piece of it will take a hit. I would be very curious to see the surveys that come from other rooms, or from sessions that I'm not involved in.

In the long run, it's not enough for Dr. Alonso to reorganize people and fire (or encourage the resignation of) others. It's also important that he work to bring some common sense into the policies and procedures that we go through on a daily basis. I'm sure that people at North Avenue read the surveys, but there isn't much sense that the commments are in any way heeded.

When my boss and I first heard about the changes that were going to be made with regard to the schools we'd be working with, there was a great deal of apprehension on our part. We truly thought that we were not exactly going to get "the best and the brightest" people to work with. We were very pleasantly surprised to find a bunch of motivated, competent people who had been just so beaten down by the way the system was working, or failing to, for them. Phone calls and emails had gone unanswered, requests for technical assistance apparently went ignored. All they needed was a little support from the people one level up and their jobs would have been so much easier and less stressful. Consequently the first part of this year, for me and for my boss, has been taken up by helping some of these people play "catch-up" with some of the students they've had problems with last year.

How difficult and frustrating it must have been for these folks, looking for help and feeling like they were shouting down a well. And in a way, nothing's changed, really: these people are getting the help they need, and as far as the ones who no longer work with me and my boss? What we're hearing is that now they're the ones who are asking for support and finding none. Do with that what you will.

Probably Not the Only Literate Guy in the Room

Jimmy Monahan: If you knew what those words meant and could spell 'em, you'd be almost literate.

—The Merry Monahans (1944)

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In my current position I get tapped a lot to present staff development. Most staff development sucks in Baltimore City schools, for a number of reasons. Sometimes the material has already been presented approximately 385,873,847,000,000 times and the people in attendance are just sick of it. In other cases, it's the presentation of the material. I can't even begin to tell you how much I hate training sessions where the presenter simply throws a PowerPoint slide, or a transparency, up on a screen and then just reads the slide to us. The alternative to reading the slide is the trainer saying, "Can we get a volunteer to read that to us?" There are many people who talk to me about this, and the overall attitude is, "Do they think we're that stupid?" (North Avenue spies reading this, please take note.)

So I was asked to do some staff development during two days' worth of training next week. GF has some surgery coming up on one of those days, so I had to turn that one down, but I said I'd be happy to present on the second day.

There are at least three reasons why I like to present on staff development days:

• First, because being the guy standing at the front of the room is far more interesting than being one of the poor schlubs in the seats;
• Second, I'm actually pretty good at it. I can do a "cold" reading (i.e., no prior exposure to the guidesheets) better than a lot of people who are supposedly well-prepared;
• Finally, because it gives me the opportunity to make the whole thing a little less painful for the participants.

It's this last part that creates work for me, but it's the kind of work that people actually appreciate. I get a hold of the presentation materials and I basically re-write the whole thing. The "icebreaker" exercise (there's always the goddamn icebreaker and never mind if everyone in the room has known everyone else since they were all prenatal) gets modified, the scripting is a little crisper, and there's absolutely NO reading the slide to the group unless I'm really trying to hammer an important point home.

So on Friday I was asked to attend a meeting where we'd receive the training materials. As it happens, we were getting the materials for both days' worth of stuff, so I won't have to attend any makeup training for the day of GF's surgery. This, of course, was the most complicated material, and fortunately the person who prepared this material did NOT create scripts for people to work from, which means that they have a series of talking points that they have to make sound conversational. The bad news is that roughly half the people in the room weren't familiar with the material they were presenting (the new computer system for developing special education programs), and they were concerned that it would be pretty obvious that they didn't know what they were talking about. So these people are asking for scripts, and the specialist who put this stuff together is resistant.

Finally I suggested that she put a little more "meat" into the talking points and certainly avoid the scripts, because so many times people are subjected to a person standing at the front of the room and reading the slide "and I resent—I resent—that sort of thing. These people aren't stupid; they can read it for themselves."

Not five minutes later, we've moved on to discussing the next module, which I will be presenting. And the first thing we're told (by a different specialist) is to put up a given transparency. And we're told to say a little speech that is, word for word, what's on the transparency. I interrupt again. "So, we read the slide."

"What?"

I repeated, "We read the slide to them."

She offers up some kind of roundabout thing about how that's not what we're doing. Early in this speech, however, I stop listening to this line of nonsense. Apparently I'm not hiding this very well, because when she was done she said, "You look like you disagree."

I said, "I look like you think people are stupid."

She launches again into some spiel about different learning styles and whatever, but I'm not listening. Instead I'm reading through the rest of the guidesheets and comparing them to the transparencies. Nearly everything that we're expected to say is simply parroting what it reads up on the screen.

So now, because I just can't do that to people, I'm in the middle of re-writing a training module. And somewhere between fifteen and twenty people will get this, and about a hundred others will have slides read to them.

Incidentally, had I gotten the job I'd applied for several months ago, this is exactly the sort of presentation I'd be putting together for others to present. So in effect I'm doing my job plus the one that someone else was hired to do.

Common Sense, Please

Janey: Miss Hoover, can we exchange our valentines?
Miss Hoover: Not just yet, Janey. First, we're going to construct paper mailboxes to store the Valentines.
Lisa: Isn't that just pointless busy work?
Miss Hoover: Bulls-eye. Get cracking.

--The Simpsons, "I Love Lisa" (2/11/93)

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One of the things that I was hoping would happen when Baltimore City Schools rearranged the schools into new "areas" was that the staff development that took place would be a little more targeted.

For instance, last year my area was comprised of about 22 elementary schools (through Grade 5) and 7 Elementary/Middle Schools (through Grade 8). This year there are two areas that are exclusively Elementary/Middle and two that are exclusively Elementary. Mine is one of the Elementary-only areas. We have 25 schools scattered across the city. Several of them, of course, are only a few minutes away from where I USED to live. Oh, well.

So at this point, one would think that when we get some professional development, we'd get something targeted specifically at the Elementary schools, right?

Wrong.

I've been asked to present some materials for tomorrow. The presentation deals with special education students who are approaching age 14 and the need for them to receive transition services related to the time when they leave school. Let me tell you, if you're 14 years old and still in the fifth grade, you're in some seriously bad shape. So basically I'm going to assist with a two-and-a-half hour presentation on a topic that NOBODY I'm presenting to will need to know about.

Once again, your tax dollars at work. I think I've said this often enough that it may have to become a posting category.

Working McLunch

McDonalds Employee: Welcome to McDonalds. What can I get you?
The Devil: A Big Mac and a large Coke.
McDonalds Employee: Fries?
The Devil: No.
McDonalds Employee: It comes to $3.47.
The Devil: [to Elliot] Do you have $3.47? I left my purse in the Underworld.

--Bedazzled (2000)

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I'm writing this in the McDonald's on York Road, somewhere not far north of Cold Spring Lane. I figured I'd stop and actually eat inside instead of enroute in my car. Read my magazine, surf the web (they got the wi-fi here--$2.95 for two hours and never mind the sign that says "30-minute limit at tables".), that sort of thing, before continuing on to my next stop.

Naturally, my cell phone rings and, like an idiot I answer it. It's my boss, looking for the folder of a student that I'd taken over the weekend to pull apart and audit for errors. He needs the folder in his hands now, dammit, now!

So I won't be going to my next stop, I guess. 

Phoney/Baloney

Dharma: [answering Greg's cell phone] The cellular customer you have called has traveled outside the service area. Please hang up and return to a simpler way of life.

—Dharma and Greg, "Yoga and Boo-Boo" (10/29/97)

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Thursday morning I was heading into a school and, because I was juggling three or four different items, I dropped my cell phone. It landed in the street, bouncing once and settling next to my foot. I picked it up, gave it the once-over, and marvelled at its resiliency, then shoved in in my pocket and continued on my way into the building.

A couple of hours later I needed to use it, so I flipped it open and started to dial. That's when I realized something wasn't quite right. There was a huge crack in the inside display, the one I hadn't checked earlier when I was standing in the middle of Linden Avenue. Along, and to either side of the crack, was a huge sideways V-shaped area of blackness. So the phone worked, as long as I didn't need to deal with text messages or calling anyone in my directory. ("Uh...I think my mother is the fourth M...")

Next day I went to the Verizon store in White Marsh. At this store you have to sign yourself into the store at a computer terminal kiosk with your phone number, your name and a choose-from-the-menu description of your problem. Your name then goes into a queue that appears on a big flatscreen monitor hanging from the ceiling. You are then free to "browse through the store at your leisure" until your name is called. Fortunately I was at the top of the queue very quickly, since there isn't that much to look at.

At the tech counter: "Hi. I dropped my phone and broke the screen. However, as I understand it, I'm insured against exactly this sort of stupidity."

He looks at the screen and taps some information into his computer. "Yeah, you're insured. There's a fifty-dollar deductible—"

Aw, crap.

"—but we're going to waive it because we don't have a replacement phone in stock."

WooHoo!

"So we can send one to your home by FedEx. Then you bring it in and we'll activate it and transfer your phone book. Meantime, hang onto this phone, at least it's working for now.  Unless you want a different phone...?"

"Are you kidding? Clearly I'm not responsible enough to handle this phone." I hate going to White Marsh, even if it's just The Avenue, but I'm not going to buy a phone that has all kinds of crap that I'm not going to use just to avoid the return trip.

Now, two other things happened on Friday (besides the trip to the Verizon store) that may actually contribute to this story having a payoff. I was scheduled to come to the office that morning, and one of the first things I mention to my boss is the broken phone and the fact that it might become wonky before I get the new phone. The other thing is that, on Friday, we have to turn in our schedules for the next week. As it happens, my boss and I both turned in our schedules to the same person at the same time. I also gave him a copy of my schedule, since I know he's going to ask for it anyway.

Flash-forward to last night. I have my phone and I bring it to the store for activation and data transfer. All goes smoothly, although the store was MUCH busier than it had been the other night, so it took awhile. The other thing is that I now have an activated phone with a very low battery (I got my original battery back and hadn't charged the phone since I'd broken it). I go home and plug it into the charger, and pretty much forget about it.

Which means that I didn't have it with me today. Now, my schedule for today involved a lot of travel about the city. First I had to go to Edgewood Elementary, which is about at the extreme western end of North Avenue. Remember, I live in Parkville, now, so it took me nearly an hour to get down there. I do my bit and then drive along North Avenue to my next destination, where I only have to spend about fifteen minutes. My third stop is at a school that is no longer in my area, but I have to help clean up a few loose ends for them. Plus, I go out to lunch with the Social Worker and the Speech Therapist. I really like them both, so I pick up the check. (Plus, I've been getting paychecks and they haven't, yet.) My next and penultimate stop is at another school new to me, where I chitchat with some members of the team and offer up some technical assistance. At this point I have a couple of questions for my boss, so I give him a call.

In short, he's kind of snotty. "Have you looked at your email today?"

"No, I've been on the road all day."

"Did you look at it late yesterday?"

"I looked through it quickly but didn't read deeply. I saw the email where you wanted me to call [thus and such school] and find out what their schedule is, then the next email that shows you already asked them for their schedule, which kind of removed the need for me to deal with it." He does this sort of thing to me, a LOT, assigning me a task and then just doing it himself ten minutes later.

"Where have you been today? I tried calling your phone—"

"I told you, it's broken."

"—and have you looked at your email?"

I opt not to go for the wiseass answer. "No, I haven't."

"So where have you been all day?"

This part kind of pissed me off. He has my schedule, I haven't deviated from it except to ADD stops to help people out. I resent the suggestion that I'm slacking off just because he doesn't know my exact longitude and latitude at a given moment. So I gave him my day in excruciating detail, including that I took a couple of people to the Paper Moon Diner and that I paid the check, and that I still had one more stop to go. Yak yak yak, chat chat chat and I hang up the phone.

At this point I start looking for my keys. They're nowhere to be found. At least a half-hour later, we discover that a teacher passing through the room had inadvertently scooped them up and left the room with them. I zoom to my last destination, hoping that people are still in the building. Fortunately, they are. I sit with them and discuss their upcoming meetings and schedule, and in the meantime I finally take the time to look at my email. One of the emails is from my boss, from earlier in the day:

[Area Boss] and I did not receive your schedule for this week.     Please email it to us with the changes that I emailed you about.  Thank you.    Make sure that we get your schedule every Friday.

Dammit, now I'm irritated. I handed in two copies of my schedule, they're both lost and it's somehow my fault. I email back:

I handed my schedule to both you and [the secretary] around midday Friday. What happens to it after that is a mystery to me.

He emails back: Email it to me again.

Now, I don't EVER email my schedule; I simply print out a calendar page from Outlook and turn that in. So why he keeps telling me to email my schedule is beyond me. Why he assumes I'm dicking around when I'm running around like a maniac helping people with this new computer system is a mystery. And why he assumes that when I don't have my phone, I'm somehow off the leash is just plain insulting. And he better cut it out, because I haven't had much vacation this year and my patience is short.

And I'll tell you what: When I hand people paperwork that they need to deal with and they claim they didn't get it, my solution is to make them sign for it. So guess what's going to happen when I turn in my schedule this Friday?

The One Where I Get Dooced

Sam Malone: So, how did your meeting go?
Rebecca Howe: It was very nice. I met the new boss, Mr. Teal. We exchanged pleasantries. You're no longer the co-manager and have been demoted to just bartender.

--Cheers, "Executive Sweet" (11/10/88)

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Late yesterday I got an email from my boss. It read:

[Bigshot at North Avenue HQ] reads your blog!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, I'm sure somebody's out there reading it. I don't get those 40 hits a day for nothing; it can't all be 10th District campaign staff.

Actually, my boss called me before I saw the email. He asked me, "Did you know that [Bigshot] reads your blog?" I told him I didn't know that as a fact, but OK. It doesn't bother me; I don't (usually) name names and I'm neither libelous nor slanderous. Then, of course, he asks me, "What's a blog?" Heh.

Then, "What do you write about?" I told him pretty much whatever I feel like writing about at that time. He found that oddly funny.

So last night, out of my usual "who reads this tripe?" curiosity, I look through my stats. It turns out that someone's been repeatedly Googling this person's name and then reading the site. What bugs me about doing it that way is, they're coming in by reading only all the posts that are tagged with "Bitching About Work", which could lead someone to believe that that's all I ever write about. I hope someone clicks the "Main" link soon, so they'll see that my job isn't my whole life; I have plenty of things to complain about. Snerk.

Frankly, I've Had Warmer Welcomes

Morbo: Morbo will now introduce the candidates...Puny Human Number One, Puny Human Number Two, and Morbo's good friend Richard Nixon.

--Futurama, "A Head in the Polls" (12/12/99)

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Today was the day that teachers report back to school. It's a day of getting rooms ready, for gearing up for the new school year, and for people like me who are new to their buildings, it's a day for meeting and greeting a new staff. Usually the first thing that happens is the principal calls a staff meeting for everyone, and today was no exception.

What was different this time around, though, was the way that I was introduced to the staff. I knew going in that the principal was not happy that I'd been transferred in to replace someone. This wasn't a comment on me, or on her. My old school had been changed to a different area, so I needed a school in my area. Simple as that.

I, and my assistant, have been in the school for several days, as we report before the teachers. Since the principal had been away on vacation, I hadn't met her before today. My assistant and I went into the meeting knowing essentially nobody in the room. We took a seat and a minute later, the principal came in.

Early in her remarks, she pointed us out to the group as "the people who will be replacing [our predecessors]." She then noted to the room that she had no say in the decision to move me in or the other person out, and that she'd work her hardest to get her back in, since last year she had a dream team.

Yeah, we're feeling welcome now.

News Flash! It's hot.

Adrian Cronauer: [doing a Walter Cronkite impression] The weather out there today is hot and shitty with continued hot and shitty in the afternoon. Tomorrow a chance of continued crappy with a pissy weather front coming down from the north. Basically, it's hotter than a snake's ass in a wagon rut.

--Good Morning Vietnam (1987)

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You know it's hot when the cactus plant on your windowsill starts screaming in pain.

I reported "back" to work on Monday, and the first two days were training sessions for us, so today was my first day in my new assignment. Yeah, I got transferred again; my last school was switched to another area in the big shuffle, so I had to move to another school in my area.

There's really no good way to get to my new school from home, so I'm going to have to leave earlier than I thought I would. As it is, I got in about 20 minutes later than I'd counted on. My new assistant was there already, and since she's brand-new, she didn't really know what to do with herself. She and I started running reports, tentatively scheduling special ed meetings for the year and such. The biggest problem we ran into was that they're renovating the school. All the windows are getting replaced, and this means that the air conditioner allocated to our office was now sitting on the floor, waiting to be re-installed. Not so great when the temperature is rapidly approaching the three-digit mark.

However, being good little soldiers, we worked pretty steadily until about 1:30, at which point we both decided to bail for the day, since the student files had spontaneously burst into flame anyway. She had an errand to take care of at North Avenue, and I decided I could work from home the rest of the day. And so off we went. This assistant is such a breath of fresh air compared to last year, I don't know what I'm going to do with the extra time once she's fully trained. Although I'm sure my boss will have a couple of ideas. 

Feeling My Cheerios

Tina Fey: An entire school showed up at a George W. Bush rally in Dearborn, Michigan this week to complain that their building is unsafe and they lack books and teachers. A sympathetic Bush promised that if elected, he'll take care of the students the best way he knows how... by executing them.

—Saturday Night Live, "Kate Hudson/Radiohead" (10/14/00)

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I might have ticked off a few people at work today.

I mentioned awhile back that we were working on the data cleansing project. We were told that the point of the project was so that when we moved into the new computer system, the transfer of the data would take place with a minimum of existing errors.

Last week, at a training session for the summer IEP Teams, we were told that the information in the old system would NOT be carried into the new system. All of the kids are going to be starting from zero; the new system will not have any of their prior information in it. They also told us that the new system might not be ready in time for us to use. Bad news, considering that the state of Maryland is requiring that every district in the state needs to be using the State-based Individual Education Program for the special education students. Well...what the hell. We only had about two years to get the system online, after all. Why shouldn't it come down to the last minute?

Later in the week our concerns were confirmed: the new system would not be ready in time. So the people in charge of that setup have been working frantically to get us a bunch of the forms in the Microsoft Word format. This still left the North Avenue crowd with five days to train us and a whole lot of Not Much Information to train us with. They did, however, note that there's a system that the state offers that we'll be using until they get the "official" software online. This was told to us by Idalyn Hauss, the head honcho of Special Education in Baltimore City.

I raised my hand. "We were told last week that the information from SETS/IEP Writer was not going to carry over to the new system."

"That's correct," she replied.

"Okay, so that means that the Data Cleansing project was a crock—"

That's when she interrupted me. She resented that, it's not a crock, there are reports to the state to be made, a couple of other things that escape me just now.

"Fine," I said. "But we were told that the point of Data Cleansing was to facilitate the transfer of data. What about if we use the state system, will that carry to the new system?"

She didn't know this one for sure, but if not, then people have been hired to retroactively enter the data on our behalf.

I don't enjoy being lied to. And I don't have a problem calling people out on it, especially when the bottom line to such an act is, I'm not considered professional enough to be told the truth.