Doings

Wow, I'm really not doing well on my keeping up with the blog thing. My apologies to the millions of fans out there.

Well, I guess the biggest excitement recently has all had to do with the school in town. It's been at a bit of a low simmer all year. We got a new teacher this year, and while my initial impression was that she wasn't a great fit for the island (and didn't realize it), she certainly came with great credentials. Despite her frequent protestations that she "wasn't about drama", there were a string of dramas that followed her around: the restraining order drama, the dog drama, the horse drama, the mail key drama, the mail drama, the disappearing materials drama, the fence for her house drama. But in the classroom, she always professional and on-task (as near as I could tell), and the kids seemed both like her and be learning what they needed to know.

All year, she had been going back to the mainland every weekend, which made sense since her husband was there, but after Christmas, she started missing the occasional Monday, or suddenly had to leave Thursday. The frequency of these absences started increasing, and I was wondering if there was something wrong that she wasn't telling us, like a family member was sick or something.

Also around this time, Long Beach Unified School District voted, in light of the serious budget cuts necessitated by the California state fiscal crisis, that they would not fund the Little Red Schoolhouse, at least for the 2010-2011 year. Minor panic ensued in our very small schoolhouse community. For those of you who don't know, the only other school on the island is in Avalon, a 90 minute bus ride over unpaved roads. Most days the bus leaves at 6:30am and gets back at 5:45pm. And we have two kids slotted to start kindergarten in the fall. This had happened before, in 2005, and at that time the Foundation that had started the school in the first place stepped in and paid the operating cost of the school for a year, whereupon LBUSD picked us up again. No one was sure what was going to happen. Would the Foundation step in again? We heard talk that Avalon would run a second bus for the younger kids. We were considering looking into starting a charter school. There were lots of serious conversations. In the end, the Foundation Board met and agreed to fund us next year, so we have a one year stay of execution, but we still have decisions to make.

Well, around the time we were hearing that we had been bailed out, the teacher disappeared. She just left one Wednesday afternoon saying she'd be back the next week and then never came back. I guess she just cracked. Everyone was surprised at first (except, I think, the woman who works at the school as lunch monitor/janitor/groundskeeper), but upon reflection, it was less surprising. We were now stuck without a permanent teacher, though, and the local woman who usually substitutes couldn't do it long term because she has another job. So two retired teachers from Avalon very kindly offered to step in and tag-team teach the rest of the year. One of them even taught at the Little Red Schoolhouse years ago, and both of them taught some of the PTA parents in Avalon. So we are very grateful to these wonderful ladies (glory, laud and honor to them for helping us out).

Now I guess if the teacher was unhappy here, then it's good for her to be there and it's good for us that she's not here, and from that standpoint I wish her well. But there are a few things about the way she left that I'm really not happy about. I'm not going to go into details because the point of this entry was to tell a story, not dump her, but I thought it would lend emotional involvement to the reader to let them know that there is anger here. (Ooooh! Drama!)

Oh, and I skipped the bit where there was a rumor in town that I was stalking the teacher. I was mildly amused that I had made it into the rumor mill in this very small town, but wearied by how ludicrous the accusation was.

Well, anyway, I believe the drama is over for now. We still need to decide what to do with the school moving forward, but we have a cushion now. So going into Spring Break new week all is well at the Little Red Schoolhouse.