Time to update the resume.

It's still not 100%, but from the tone of today's Board meeting I'm seriously discouraged. Thanks to everyone for the wishes for a successful presentation, by all means it was an excellent one. We made them laugh, we made them cry, and the audience gave us a hearty applause at the end. As a matter of fact I would have said it was flawless, shy of one incident, caused by an unnecessary and selfish staff member.

You may have remembered me mentioning a counselor that we got stuck with, because she caused friction wherever she went and the district felt my principal would be the one to handle her. And for a year and a half we did. She had other counselors in tears. She alienated the half of the faculty she came in contact with. She had zero (0, none, nill, nada, nyente) tact when it came to dealing with me and technology issues. But we tolerated her because 99% of the time we she was sequestered in a small corner of the building and we had no contact with her. Did I mention that she is a counselor. Except for during Teacher Appreciation week, when she conviently decided she's a teacher. Because at our school she's really neither. She's also one of those people that insists being called by her title, as in Dr.____, not just Ms.____, or by her first name.

Anyway, we had an awesome presentation, and the principle was wrapping up the whole thing. She mentioned that we have only one counselor, and one intern that is paid for out of one of our high risk grants. At this point this (ahem) counselor starts waving her arms, saying something I didn't hear. She did get the attention of one of the board members who asks the principal again how many counselors we have, saying 'isn't it three?' The principal first tries to deflect it with comments about how this person doesn't have any student load, so they are effectively not a counselor at our school. Another member on the board comes back with 'but you do have three counselors'. This is when our response should have been 'yeah, but you foisted her on us bacause no one else could handle her shit!', but instead we heard 'that was a district decision, we didn't request another counselor'. This is where the board member has the chutzpah, (that's yiddish for cahones) to say 'That isn't true'. Again, we should have returned with 'you lying two faced son of a coyote', but instead my principal just said that they should discuss this some other time and continued on with her closing.

I'm glad that we got the chance to make our case. I'm proud of the presentation we made and I'm proud that we did not just sit back and let things happen to our school. But I can't help feeling defeated.