My First Convocation, Can I Have An Amen!

Over my many years as an employee of one organization or another I've attended in-service training, various seasonal conferences, seminars, training academies, and professional development days but I've never attended a convocation.  I can now officially add convocation to my list of knowledge acquisition sessions.  To be honest with you, I thought a convocation was an odd event to attend as a school group because I thought it would have preachers up front pontificating about scripture.  That thought didn't last long as I knew I was attending this convocation with every employee of my school as well as every employee of our school corporation.  The objective of the convocation was to get everyone fired up about the start of classes on August 3rd.  I won't bore you with all of the details of this convocation but just a few of the fabulous bragging rights for my school and school corporation.

1. IRead3 - my school had an 84% passing rate for our third grade scholars.  This passing rate just blew the doors off of our previous high.
2. My school corporation educates the largest population of scholars that have special needs.
3. My school corporation educates the largest population of scholars that are English as a second language learners.
4. My school corporation educates a population of approximately 1,700 certified homeless scholars.  Yes, you read that number correctly.
5. The valedictorian of one of my school corporations high schools was an English as a second language learner.
6. The salutatorian of one my school corporations high schools was certified homeless.

Despite all of the challenges my school and school corporation faces on a daily basis we have had huge successes that are worthy of the label fabulous bragging rights.  So I'm bragging about my school and school corporation and rightfully so because if I waited for the media to announce our successes I'd be long dead and gone.  You see, the media's best revenue generator is stories of death, dying, and destruction and not the huge successes of students that primarily come from a low social economic background.

July 30th and July 31st

Gnu and I are in the classroom together for the first time since June 9th and one of us is real excited about being back in the room.  That makes me feel pretty good especially when she sat down with me at my desk in the back of the room to shared her ideas and game plan to start the school year.  I won't bore you with the details but I will mention two items that she is pretty excited about.  First, she wants to do at least four field trips this year.  She mentioned going to a zoo, a baseball game, a pumpkin patch plus a day at a horse ranch.  Second, she is going to utilize a website called donorschoose.org to solicit financial support to buy either chrome books or iPads for our scholars.  When Gnu shared her beginning of the school years plans she expressed her disappointment with the lack of technology that is available to our scholars and I'm agreeing with her.  Ideally, we'd like to have one device for each scholar but that will be cost prohibitive for a lot of people so we'd be happy if two or three donors would each buy one device.  Right now we are playing the wait and see game.  I'll keep you updated should we have any success. 

Speaking of fabulous bragging rights, I already have one for the new school year and a scholar has yet to enter our doorway.  As I mentioned in a previous blog, we'll have six scholars in the room to start the year.  Three of them will be new and Uh-Uh-Uh, Grrr! and EM are the other three.  Gnu and I were both somewhat surprised that MiniJ was not on our list.  I figured his parental unit(s) moved again but Gnu was certain that was not the case so she made inquiries about his status.  Apparently it was decided by highly placed overhead personnel, that mainly occupy a cushy leather chair behind and a Mount Everest sized desk, that MiniJ should attend a different school this year.  When Gnu shared this information with me my response was "why and the hell would they do that?"   It wasn't long after our conversation about MiniJ that MiniJ's parental unit contacted Gnu via a text message.  I wasn't part of the conversation but I was told later how upset MiniJ was when told about this school change.  From my perspective he, as well as his parental unit, had every right to be upset as this change of schools was totally uncalled for.  Not knowing what to do, Gnu contacted one of our colleagues for advice and then shared the advice with MiniJ's parental unit.  I'm not sure about the amount of time that elapsed after the discussion with MiniJ's parental unit but the advice worked and MiniJ will rejoin us a scholar number seven for the new school year.

So what's the fabulous bragging rights.  Gnu just did the right thing.  She stepped up and fought for this young scholar and his parental unit to get him back to a school where he had successes both academically and behaviorally.  She didn't have to do that.  If fact, in doing so, she just increased the degree of difficulty for the next school year.  And you know what, I'm damn proud of her because she is a school teacher and teachers will always do what is right for a scholar. 

It's Sunday evening, August 2nd.  In approximately fifteen hours I'll get into my car and head into the twilight zone for another school year.  Guess what?  I'm excited!