Week X

School starts for kids on Monday, August 20th. This is the first week for teachers, although Monday and Tuesday all the regular classroom teachers (i.e. not me) were at AMSTI training. That means that the past two days I haven't had much to do. Today everybody came back, and we had a lovely 3-hour meeting about the following.....

We are on a six-day schedule. Monday will be Day 1, Week A. Our resource classes (art, music, computer, library, and counseling) are scheduled based on day number, not Art on Monday, etc.

Each Day 6 is a no-resource day and is reserved for meetings, especially for us special ed folks. Each class also has another day during the week with no resource class--it might be any day 1-5.

We also rotate counseling and library, each every other week. Some people have counseling during Week A, some during Week B. So if you have counseling on Day 3 during Week A, that means on Day 3 Week B, you'll have library.

AND IT CHANGES EVERY WEEK! Monday will be Day 1 Week A. The next Monday will be a Day 6. That means Tuesday will be Day 1 Week B.

This means that kindergartners NEVER know which resource they have, they just know that Day 6 is always a "bummer." It can be for teachers too, because that's one less outlet for busy kids and one less break during the day. But this may or may not affect me much this year because.....

WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WE ARE DOING. I am deadly serious. Well, okay, we know we will be helping kids with their schoolwork and helping coordinate therapies and services, but we have no idea how many kids, how old they are, or what type of services they will need. I heard today we may have as many as THIRTEEN KINDERGARTNERS with IEPs (individualized education plans) coming up and that is HUGE. We know of another two that we will definitely be servicing, but we don't know whose room they'll be in yet, which is kind of important because they will both need a LOT of services.

Two of our staff went to a training workshop about autism and communication today. Originally it was going to be me and April (the chick I'm working under) because we're supposedly the "early childhood" folks. But since Mandy has the self-contained class (the class for kids whose needs can't be met in a traditional classroom) they thought these kids might go in there with her, and we might not even have enough kids for an early childhood unit and me and April would just go all over for whoever, wherever, whenever.

Then we heard about these thirteen kindergarten kids. Who we know nothing about. Who may or may not be enrolled at our school.

Oh, did I mention we are supposed to start providing services for all these kids on the first day of school? At least 13 is my lucky number.