Really? A Week Already?

I'm not even remotely surprised that I have not posted this week.  I'm actually wondering just where the week went.  To say it flew by was putting it mildly.

The first full week of school is always like that but this year, in between STEM and the fact that we're bursting at the seams with kids, seems to make it a bit more chaotic.  It's one thing to learn 22 names for a class.  It's quite another to learn 34.  Now multiply that by five class periods and you get a clue how frazzled we all are this year.

Our numbers aren't going down.  The kids are showing up, very few are withdrawing and heading elsewhere and even more new kids are showing up.  If it keeps up like this we'll probably get another teacher or two, but where they'll put them is anybody's guess.  The PE classes are already so large that the gym can't hold all the kids so some of the kids are walking across the parking lot to the city-owned community center to use the gym there.  The electives teachers - music, band, art, PE, and so on - have classes inching up towards 40 in size. Seventh grade doesn't fit in the lunch room so a few groups of kids are eating in what we call the Large Group Instruction classroom right down the hall from the cafeteria.  The Head Janitor put in a request with downtown to provide us with 80 student desks from the warehouse because we'd ran out.

All of which makes me wonder...what were the people that got paid the big bucks thinking when they redrew the zoning maps and said we'd be down - way, way, way down - in enrollment this year?  Last year's sixth grade was big, and all you had to do was drive by our feeder elementaries and see all the portable classrooms they had to realize that there was a population bubble heading our way. I'm wondering if these people even got into the neighborhoods.

So the attendance secretary from the middle school that we rezoned with (we took, supposedly 85 of their kids, but the real number is over 100) is having a freak out because they may lose teachers because their numbers dropped and our attendance secretary is telling her to send them our way because we're about 200 over predictions.  (Some of us have suggested we just send the kids back to their old school, but that would really cause some community melt-downs.)

It's nuts.