School’s Out For Summer!

No More Teachers, No More Books….

I’m bracing myself because in just a few hours our children will be home from school, having completed their school year. Yes, here in the United States most students follow a traditional school calendar where they start in August or September and continue on through until the following May or June. Our kids will have a ten week break, but it won’t be all fun and games — they’ll attend various camps and we’ll take a brief family trip at some point.

This school year has been a bit of a challenge, not so much for our children (we have two boys)  who did very well, but because of all of the tension surrounding schooling.  Our children are in public school and it seems that this year we saw how challenging of an environment it can be especially as new state teaching mandates kicked in and as funding for some of the required programs dried up.

…No More Teacher’s Dirty Looks

As the economy has taken a slide so has the school district’s budget and it is beginning to show.  For the upcoming academic year the school board may shave five days off of the calendar in order to balance the budget, dropping the school year from 180 to 175 days.  In addition, class size may grow as hiring and spending freezes mean that current faculty will be required to do more for less money even as thousands of new students flow into our 140,000+ pupil countywide school district.

This also means that a number of teachers will be leaving, having burned out because they are being asked to take on more responsibilities while shouldering pay cuts. Moreover, those teachers who do remain and are tenured will have a job, but they may be reassigned to another school, a bad habit of the Wake County Public School System which often does the same thing to children — reassign them to another school.

Speaking about reassignment, when the school board proposed sending our neighborhood children to a new school some eighteen miles away (45 minute bus ride) from our home beginning in 2010, parents banded together and told them we weren’t sending our kids that far away. This is a mostly suburban school district meaning that there are plenty of schools closer to our neighborhood than the new one. Thankfully, the board reversed themselves and will not reassign our children, at least for now.

So Where Is The Obama Money?

Perhaps most shocking to some teachers, particularly those who voted for Barack Obama this past fall, is that the promised federal money set aside for the school district hasn’t come in yet. But, when it does arrive it’ll be used to build new schools, not directed toward raising teaching standards nor will it be used to actually educate our children. Huh?!

I’m not saying that some teachers are having buyer’s remorse when it comes to the presidential election but when your school district is being hammered financially and the president is promising to send billions of dollars your way, then cutbacks seem to make no sense at all.

The Alice Cooper Approach

I know that I’m dating myself, but when I was in high school, Alice Cooper released a song titled, “School’s Out For Summer!” which ended up becoming a classical anthem for disaffected students.  Mr. Cooper (yes, he is a guy) had a rebellious attitude, one that I readily embraced at that time, a decision which adversely affected my grades. Of course, I certainly hope my children don’t follow me down that rebellious path!

But, as much as so many good (and bad) lessons are learned while in school, some are not. Many years later, Alice (Vincent Damon Furnier) began to follow Jesus Christ, a path I also chose to take not too many years after Cooper’s 1972 hit was released. What does this have to do with school being out? Not much, but it does have a lot to do with God laying hold of lives and changing them for His good despite decisions we make which can ultimately bring us so much harm.

Photo Credit: Steve Woods