Reflections

If we considered the odds, he wasn't supposed to "make it". He was an active, athletic youth who had little interest in schoolwork. He could easily do the work, especially math, but there wasn't a reason to excel at it. Over the course of his school years, he collected numerous behavior referrals.  In elementary school, teachers labeled him a smart mouth. I can still recall the memory of walking by his fourth grade classroom and seeing a desk in the air. It wasn't the student who had thrown it. It was his teacher, acting out of such frustration. In high school, things got tougher. People on the outside assumed he was too deep in trouble to stand for. He eventually dropped out of school. Since the age of 15, he had always been employed (had those soft skills that employers wanted but maybe schools didn't quantify at that time), so he worked. A year later, he decided to return to school. Imagine the bravery that took back in the late 1980s. The merit of...

"All still means all, right? Doesn't mean some of them , or the easier ones, or the ones with only great manners. Can't just mean the ones without difficult learning needs or who protest they can't stand our efforts. It means all. That all is so important to our work because once we let that all mean only some, we run the risk of failing students, some whom could be our very own children. We'd never let that be ok. So, how can we let it be ok for the kids with other parents? And, if we let it be ok, how do we decide which ones are worth saving and which are…" These are the words I wish I had said, as an Assistant Superintendent, as I considered a recent interaction. There were some recent conversations around specific students that were presenting with major defiance and beating us at launching more obstacles than we could appear to meet. But, the words didn’t come to me as eloquently. I reassured the person in my conversation that we were on the right tr...