I'm still alive. Wish I was fishing. Don's right. School is back in session. It's going to be an interesting year. Our enrollment has been on the rise for the last 5 years and it's worse every year. It's great job security but I've never had my own classroom and I share an office with 3 other people so it's frustrating at times, hard to get anything done, and tough for studednts. We are a 6-8 building and now have a little over 1200 students. Class sizes are approaching 40 and the number of challenging special education students moving into the community is alarming. We allow choice here in CO so if parents want to transport their child to our school and their application is accepted then we take them. We no longer take SPED students by choice because it's impacting the services we can provide to our neighborhood students. I have an enormous amount of behaviors this year. Yesterday and today I ran around all day when I wasn't teaching dealing with a student barking at teachers during class, kids that were MIA (not skipping just didn't know where to go so sitting in the hall or bathroom seemed like a good idea), one that insisted that he wasn't himself but his binder was and demanded the teacher call on his binder, refusals to work, hands on, and more. A new middle school is being built and is scheduled to open next year and then the boundaries will get redrawn and we'll finally get some relief.
I haven't done squat with the squirrel. Depending on the weather, I may start taking it apart over Thanksgiving and seeing if the cables and brake line are still going to work with the 400 bars. Pretty sure I have enough supplies left over to do the actual rewire but still need to order some stuff like the gauge mount and breakout box.
