What Happens Next Year

 Okay, I confess. I was resigned to the idea that my school was going to be closed. I spent months putting on a brave face, pretending that I would march forward into the face of overwhelming odds and make the powers that be shiver in their boots. I made some mildly impassioned speeches, and carried my party's line, but inside I was terrified about what was going to happen to me.

After more than a quarter of a century on one spot, I could not imagine where I could set up shop with anything approaching the kind of respect and autonomy I enjoy at the place I have called "home" for all these years. Here being Mister Caven carries some weight. It means that I have institutional knowledge and wisdom that goes back to a previous century. I can remember when there were a different set of portables on the yard. I can remember when we all moved out of the school for a year while it was remodeled. That was a long time coming, and now visitors who come into our school see a building that looks like it's been through a few tough weeks, but at least the wiring for our network is safely tucked into the walls.

Wiring? Yes. Once upon a time volunteers came to our school on a weekend and ran CAT5 cable throughout the school in order to bring Al Gore's Internet to all the teachers and students. We had one long run that snaked its way out to those portables, not the old ones, but the new ones. That was the line that vandals routinely pulled down over the weekend. We asked if that might be a place where this newfangled "wireless" connection might be tried, and for years we were denied because of security issues. 

Now we do most all of our daily business without ever plugging in an ethernet cable. Teachers take attendance online. We project videos with projectors and share files in the cloud. Security? That's someone else's concern. 

I know that there are plenty of other schools in my district that experienced this same learning curve. I know that I can talk about "the olden days" because I'm old. And I've sat in one place for a long time, by our district's standards. Which is why I had that gnawing fear. The one that said I might go someplace else to finish out my career and not know everyone by name and not be able to trace back the history of that little corner of asphalt to the time the trash truck turned too abruptly and caused the chunks of playground to come up in pieces. And where the breaker for the faculty lounge is broken. 

And all the families and all the teachers and all the principals I have worked with all those years. 

I'm afraid of letting it go. 

There. I said it.