In the unabridged version of my convocation address, there is a passage that reminds our employees that each one of them has an important role to play in our school district. Our core mission and purpose as a public school is readily apparent and leaves little to the imagination. Think about it: When considering school and schooling, what comes to mind? You likely think of the classroom. The teacher. Instruction. The interaction and interplay the occurs within the confines of the student-teacher relationship when that lightbulb goes off and the student 'gets it'. I rhetorically asked our employees to imaging how difficult our work with be without the support of one another. I encouraged them to consider the type of chaos that might ensue without our administrative assistants. Or a school without clean restrooms and overflowing trashcans. The fact is, without the non-instructional support staff we could not function. To help illustrate that fact, I have a tale to tell.
You see, on the first day of school a drama unfolded. It included a series of cascading events where the setup had all the ingredients for a significant disruption to the learning environment. One that, with the benefit of hindsight would have likely resulted in a delay to the start of the school year. Yet in the final analysis, and as all of this unfolded, no one was the wiser. First day celebrations, introductions, and the beginning of instruction went forward without a hiccup. Truth be told, at the writing of this column I am relatively certain the majority of our teaching staff remains unaware.
Before we begin, I think it is first important for you to be reminded of my philosophy of what constitutes a successful first day of school. There really are only three ingredients to ensure a good start: 1.) get everyone to school safely; 2.) get everyone fed; and, 3.) get everyone home safely. I am not being facetious here: for me that really is the whole ballgame on the first day of school. If those three things happen, I am confident that everything in between will be successful. That, because I have such confidence in our teaching staff. Further, those three evolutions are among the most complicated and logistically challenging events we have in the course of any given school day. While extensively planned, up until the day of execution it is all just conjecture and theory.
And it all began to unravel as I was backing out of my driveway the morning of the first day of school. Keep in mind, I was early that morning with it being the first day and all. Like everyone, I was anxious to get to the office. Based on the lead in from the week of hard work everyone had put it, I was anticipating one of our best starts ever. Then my phone rings:
"We have no gas in the high school", said Mr. Dieken. "That means we have no hot water to run the dishwasher and no way to cook lunch. What should we do?"
Aside from really not knowing what we should do I had a lot of questions, which aren't really pertinent to the story at hand. I hadn't even left my driveway yet and we were off to a rough start. Granted, we had options but at that point they weren't really all that great.
As you all know, my commute is pretty short so I didn't have a lot of windshield time to come up with a dynamite solution. The problem was still rolling around in my head when I walked through the door and told Sheila that we weren't off to a very good start.
"That's not all," she told me. "We also have bus problems. According to the DOT, Butterfield Road was supposed to be open from Highway 20 to Riders Road. It isn't".
For a bit of context, population growth on the north end of the district has been rapid. That growth, coupled with what we had anticipated with road construction was the topic of a lengthy meeting with the bus drivers that run the north routes in the district a few weeks prior to the start of the school year. We spent a lot of time considering the structure of routes based both on the size of the load, as well as road closures and other delays with road construction. This unplanned closure scrambled those plans.
Well, to make a long story short, the drivers solved the problem on the fly and arrived within minutes of their regularly anticipated arrival time. Lunch was prepared in the elementary kitchen and the maintenance department loaded it into the truck and drove it to the high school. They even helped serve it.
So those three goals? We met every single one. Thanks of course to the support staff which includes our transportation department, maintenance division, and food service program. They were faced with a problem and simply rolled up their sleeves and got to work.
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