Current/Recent Reading List

14 August 2006

S.I.T. your butt down

As if I needed further reminders that school time is nigh upon us, I turned my cell phone on this morning to discover a message left last night from the chairman of our School Improvement Team, of which I am once again a member. She was telling me that our new principal, and the county supervisor for secondary schools (one of my old principals) wanted to meet with us today from 8-1. Nothing like a little notice, huh?

Since my son had day camp this morning, there’s no way I could have made it anyway (darn the luck). But this may as well serve as a brief introduction to the Leviathan that can be a School Improvement Team. Commonly referred to as the S.I.T. team, previous experience allows me to vouch that no committee ever had a more apt acronym. Only if they could rename it to fit acronyms like B.L.O.V.I.A.T.E. or B.O.O.O.O.O.R.I.N.G. would there be more aptness.

The committee, I believe, is mandated by the state to exist in every public school in order to address school policies and concerns, and to create a huge document each year (named the School Improvement Plan, oddly enough)that outlines the school’s missions and strategies for meeting them. I’m sure there are people out there who comb through such documents page by page, but then I hear there are also scientologists out there, and fans of the Atlanta Hawks.

From time to time, the committee can make a real difference in recommending practical policies that help streamline the average school day, or take care of particular problem areas. The difficulty is that it is a committee, and a large committee, and there are lots of opinions, and… need I say more? Just sticking to the topic at hand can be a chore. I think there is some hope that this year’s team will not have the interminable meetings of the past, because there are a lot of members with young children (we all should hold on to some little bit of naiveté, shouldn’t we?). In any case, trust me: there will be plenty of entertainment to come from this front.

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