Break

It's winter break here. I'll probably be off until at least mid-January.

If you sign it, they will come

Two of my students have now moved outside the boundary lines of the school which should mean that they would attend a different school in the district. These are "behavior kids" so they take up a lot of time, increase the number of referrals and, in this case anyway, decrease the test scores because neither of them are meeting their grade benchmarks yet. So you'd think the principal would be very happy for them to move on. Yet, in the past two days he has been proactive about filling out the paperwork in order to keep them here. He's signed the necessary documents and sent them on to district office. Does this happen elsewhere?

A few of my favorite things

- When Headache comes to school every day for a week
- When 43% attends school above his 43% average
- When Let's Ride Bikes talks about getting his grades up
- When Headache self starts
- When Trains! self starts
- When any of my students self start
- When I don't see Math Major- for him, no news is good news
- When a team of teachers said they thought they'd be OK with less support for one of our students because they know what to do now
- When the principal talks about civil rights for students with disabilities
- When I met School Much? for the first time
- When Fake Gangsta gets excited about good grades
- When Miss Popularity doesn't get suspended
- When Virgil comes to study hall and works the entire period- which is just about everyday
- When the Magician doesn't get suspended
- When Trains! tries to use "Snoop language" (ex. school = sch-zool, railroad = r-zailroad)- he can't really do it
- When the students are really excited to see me after I've been out for a day
- When the district & principal grants permission for students who have moved to continue attending the school because it's beneficial to the student though it impacts AYP negatively
- When the hype around a student dissipates and the teachers can actually see the student

We meet at last

School Much? is a student who has been on my caseload for nearly a year but who hasn't attended school here. He's got a laundry list of issues that keep him from actually coming to school but he has been going to the tutoring we've set up for him. So I dropped by a tutoring session (which are held at the local library) last week. He was a very pleasant, quiet and rather gigantic young man. He wasn't totally against the idea of attending regular school at some point. This is progress!