Center of Gravity

Major shift today. Last night, I got a phone call and two e-mails about an impromptu staff meeting before school this morning. Let me remind you that our school day begins with the bright-eyed children walking through our doors at 7 am, which puts the meeting around 6:45. Entirely too early to be discussing any kind of information, much less any kind of pertinent information.

And pertinent information it was. We found out that our principal is being moved to an extremely low-performing elementary school in Charlotte as a strategic staffing initiative. Extremely low as in the bottom 5%. Of the state. Her last day is February 11th, giving us two weeks to let that bomb of information settle and for her to clean out her stuff and prepare to transform a new school.

I don't really know what to think here. I've known for awhile that I haven't planned on coming back next year, something that I finally told my principal about a few weeks ago. Now she's leaving, and suddenly the whole school is uncertain. With her here, as tough as she could about certain things (like turning in lesson plans and posting lesson objectives on the board and staying top of relatively minute details like bulletin boards), we all knew what we were getting. We knew what to expect. Now we don't even know who our new principal will be, much less what he or she will be like. There's nothing to do now but wait.

She announced the news on the morning announcements and I talked to my kids about it during morning meeting, explaining that sometimes people are needed in other places, especially when there are other kids just like them whose schools aren't as good as ours. They decided that no, it wasn't fair that the other schools weren't like ours and that yes, it was a good thing that our principal was stepping up and helping out. Case closed.

But then, at lunch, Jha'Nya asked me agin why the principal has to go. I explained again that she was needed at another school to help the teachers there be better teachers for their students.

"Why don't the teachers just fix what they're doing wrong? Then everyone can just stay where they are and be happy."

I wish the achievement gap were that easy to solve.