Tuesday....

This school does not want us. They will not work with us to find us a place to work with the kids. There are four trailer "condos" and we were initially told by Ms. C, the Reading Coach that we could use one, but then the principal got SUPER pissed and said they were all in use. We kept trying to ask if they were all in use all the time, or if there were some open times that we could use them. We didn't really get any answers to that. There is an empty classroom, but we're told we can't use it because a program called Better Basics will be using it for three hours once a week. Seriously? We can't use it the other 34.5 hours a week that we're in the school? Yesterday we finally set up a "classroom" under the stairs. We got permission from the principal to move out a broken refrigerator and to move around a broken copier and we got all set up in this cozy little spot and we were all excited about it. We got back to school this morning and were kicked out from under the stairs because they wanted to fix the fridge (that no one apparantly uses since it was sitting there broken for who knows how long) and move it back into that spot. Tracy (my Americorps co-worker) and I just sat under the stairs for the longest time trying to figure out what to do and feeling so defeated. Tracy called the school district's Employee Assistance Program director to get some advice. She was told that Whatley (the school) has been difficult in the past and they tend to not like Americorps. She told us to call Ms. D (our coordinator) to ask how the librarian feels about Americorps and then seeing if we can set up shop in the library. Kind of feels like picking allies for a war or something... Aren't we all on the same side? Aren't we all in it for the good of the kids? We couldn't get ahold of Ms. D so we ended up moving our stuff back into the room the Reading Coach shares with the Speech Pathologist and another specialist. So there are 5 of us splitting one classroom. Not ideal, but at least we know our stuff won't walk off...

I was in a meeting yesterday with the reading coach, the Better Basics people and the other specialists. The principal talked a lot about giving help to the kids who had middle and upper test scores because "those are the ones who can be moved". So we're working with middle and upper so the school's test scores as a whole will go up. I'm sort of upset by that. I have a really hard time just letting the kindergarten and first graders who don't cut it slip through the cracks. Especially since this is a k-8 school. We're setting up the k and 1st graders to fail for their entire 8 years at Whatley. That's so much time to grow and improve and develop.

After school I do tutoring for the school's afterschool program which is held at a library about a block away. It's seriously the cutest little library, but all the shelves are half full. The very bottom shelves are empty and there are many places where the whole shelves are taken out for displays. It's really sad! The librarians are super sweet though.

Today we had a moment of silence because the 13th was the anniversary of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing that killed 4 little girls. I asked Ms. C about it and she said that to this day if you ask someone who was there about it they still get choked up and you can just see the grief in their faces. I can't even imagine suffering a loss like that or witnessing that.