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Apr 7, 2014

I Leave for a Week, and Everything Goes to Hell

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Forgive me, Internet, for I have sinned. It’s been over a week since my last post, but in my defense, I have a really good excuse:

 Mira at the WDW Castle

We spent the week at Walt Disney World, partially for me to attend the Type-A WDW Workshop, and partially to have a vacation with my family. There were some amazing moments, and some amazingly good (and bad) timing to certain events, but we’re home again and settled back into real life.

I wanted to tell more about our trip to Disney, but then something else got in the way that demands attention first. The day after we returned from our trip, I was summoned to a community meeting regarding changes to the gifted education services offered by our school district. Cordy is identified as gifted and receives gifted services, so naturally this concerned me.

Her school offers an ECLIPSE class, which is a self-contained class for 4th and 5th grade gifted students. The class provides enrichment beyond the standard curriculum and encourages more out-of-the-box thinking – the perfect environment for our creative thinker who can’t always explain how she found her answer because it just appeared in her head. We (meaning her parents and the staff of the school) had been planning for her to join this ECLIPSE class for years, and at her IEP meeting earlier this year, we agreed that in April of this year we’d have her start spending a small amount of time in the class to help transition her into it.

That same day, I also received a letter in the mail from the district, telling me that the entire elementary gifted education program was being restructured, condensing all of the highly gifted children into five schools instead of the sixteen neighborhoods where the ECLIPSE classrooms are currently found. It also informed me that Cordy was being reassigned to an entirely different school in order to attend an ECLIPSE class.

Wait…WHAT?

The school district is, in fact, getting rid of ANY gifted education services at her current school, which has nearly a quarter of the student population identified as gifted. They intended to send her to a school where only 4% of the student population is identified as gifted. How is this equitable?

But wait… it gets worse. Beyond giving parents no choice at all as to where their children are to go in the Columbus City Schools district for gifted services, they also gave us only seven (7!) days to respond to the letter. Never in my life would I have considered the school they want to send Cordy to as an appropriate placement for her. I certainly wouldn’t have toured the school. Where she is now is where everyone believes she is best served. Everyone, that is, other than the district administration.

There’s even MORE bad news, though. Should a parent decide they don’t want their child to attend a failing school in order to get gifted services, there’s a line on the form we’re to return where we’re asked to sign to decline services. However, included in that is a statement that says we accept that our child will not receive gifted services if we decline the district’s placement option.

So parents, who had no advance knowledge of these changes and were not given any chance to provide input, are being told that our gifted children will either go to the failing school demanded by the district, or they will have their right to gifted services removed.

I don’t respond well to threats, especially where my children are concerned. I attended the meeting that night to learn more about the reasoning behind these decisions, only to find their reasoning was all based on lies. The Gifted Task Force recommendations that the district claims helped drive the changes have no recommendations for altering ECLIPSE. The state standards that they also referenced have no bearing on the current ECLIPSE classes, either.

Where does all of this leave Cordy? In a lose-lose situation. If she transferred to the failing school for gifted ed, she would suffer emotional trauma at being sent to a strange location, with kids she’s unfamiliar with and a staff she doesn’t know. Her anxiety would skyrocket and negative behaviors would likely increase, making it impossible for her to learn. If she remains at her current school, she’ll have the comforts of “home” but stagnate without gifted services to keep her mind active. Should her mind not be sufficiently challenged, her anxiety takes hold again, she becomes trouble in the classroom, and she shuts down and doesn’t have interest in school. Her team at school agrees with these assessments.

It breaks my heart to know she’s being placed in this situation by a careless administration who are likely pleased with the outcome, considering that her mom fought them and won during the school levy battle. But they’re placing hundreds of other children in a bad situation, too, ripping them away from friends and schools they know so they can be placed in failing schools to boost the building’s test scores.

I’m not sad, though. I’m angry. We’ve put enormous amounts of work into getting Cordy to where she is now, and we’re not about to let a tone-deaf, pigheaded administration undo those efforts. Other parents are angry, too, and we’re organizing to resist these changes. Should the district refuse to postpone these changes until parent input can be given to better shape any update to the gifted education program, we will choose to refuse to allow our children to take the OAAs or any other state standardized tests. Our kids are more than a test score, but if Columbus City Schools will only value them as test scores, we’ll take that away from them.

We have no plans to change Cordy’s school. She will remain at her school, and she will continue to receive gifted education services, despite the district’s claims otherwise. If it involves legal action, we’ll do it. She’s a twice exceptional child, and her special needs restrict her from changing schools for gifted services. She was placed in this school by district staff because of the gifted services and the special needs services available, and the district will honor that commitment to her until she is finished with fifth grade, at which time we may choose to leave this train wreck of a school system.

Sigh…it would be so much easier on the school district if they’d stop picking fights.

Parents of CCS children – find out more on how you can make your voice heard at this site. Parents of CCS gifted students are also encouraged to join this Facebook group.

Disney post coming soon, promise!

Filed Under: Cordy, school ·


Feb 7, 2014

Snow Day Ramblings

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All of my focus has been drained away, so apologies if this is disjointed.

Today is the third snow day in a row for us, and our…eighth? seventh? who can keep track anymore?…of the school year. It’s an unheard of number of snow days for my kids. A few of the days made sense, with extreme cold and wind chills of -20, and this Wednesday’s snow and ice storm in the early morning, making for dangerous travel.

Yesterday and today were called off mostly because the side streets and many sidewalks are still snow covered. I remember days that had more snow in previous years where the kids still had school. This is not a “kids nowadays are wimps” complaint, this is more of a “what happened to city snow removal?” complaint. I understand the need to protect the safety of kids, and wouldn’t want to put my kids at risk for a bus getting stuck in the snow or sliding and having an accident, so I approve of looking out for the safety of the kids. But the snow stopped early Wednesday morning, and snowy roads should have been cleared by now.

Mira in the snow, 2009Mira, 2009 – I think Cordy missed just one day of preschool with that snowstorm

As of last night, the news said the city was just starting to get to the side streets and neighborhood streets. It seems like Columbus used to have a better snow response team and reached the entire city in under three days. Most of the suburban schools were back in session on Thursday, with clear streets, while we continued to wait. Maybe Columbus should take some of that large tax surplus they have and invest a little in additional snow removal teams?

So, we’ve been stuck at home, two stir crazy kids and one mom who still has to work. I’m thankful that I work from home and don’t have to scramble to find childcare during these snow days. But it’s also hard to stay focused on work with constant interruptions. Cordy has been doing a lot of reading during the past few days, finishing another Percy Jackson novel and earning more points for her school’s read-a-thon. Mira has been trying her best to engage her sister and force Cordy to play with her. It’s worked a few times, but most of the time it ends in, “MOOOOOM! Mira’s bothering me!”

We’ve had plenty of TV watching and game playing , too. I’ve learned just how little there is to watch on TV in the late morning/early afternoon. Especially for kids. Your choices are pretty much preschool and younger programming, or older teen programming that they’re not quite ready to watch. This is only strengthening my desire to cut cable entirely. On the upside, it’s strengthened family bonding time, too, as I’d rather sit with Mira and let her read to me rather than endure Bubble Guppies.

Cordy still in PJsWe’ve been staying in pajamas until late in the day, too.

And having the kids around 24/7 has resulted in my being unable to get away from the germs that Mira likes to bring home. She’s had a cold since early this week, and now that we’ve been in such close contact for so long, I’m now getting her cold.

I love seeing the snow cover everything outside in a beautiful, sparkling blanket of white. But I’d be just as happy to see it gone if it meant no more snow days this school year. I want some “me-time” again – just a little – before I go bonkers.

I’m really looking forward to Monday, for two reasons. First, if Mother Nature has mercy on us, the kids will go back to school and we’ll have some sense of normalcy again. At least until they’re out of school on Wednesday for a professional development day.

And second, I’ll be seeing the orthopedic specialist my doctor recommended regarding my shoulder. Yep, it still hurts, although it’s not as bad as it had been, thank goodness. Certain movements are still painful, but if I’m sitting still, it doesn’t continuously ache. Unless there’s a storm coming in, and then my shoulder aches down into my arm. Hooray for a weather-predicting shoulder? I can think of far better superpowers I’d rather have. Hopefully this doctor will have some solutions, or at least a place to start to get rid of this shoulder pain.

Filed Under: school, snow ·


Dec 16, 2013

You’re Never Too Old To Stop Learning

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“Mom, why do I have to go to school? Homework is so dull and boring! It’s draining my life from me!” Cordy has always been one to tend towards the dramatic, although these outbursts have become more frequent in the last month.I understand her frustration. “Well, sweetie, we all have our jobs to do. Mommy and daddy each have jobs to earn money and help our companies with their purpose. And your job right now is to go to school and learn everything you need to know to be a successful adult who will make a difference in the world.”

“I can’t wait until I can be done with school and never need to learn anything ever again!” she huffed. I knew she didn’t mean that. She loves to learn and absorbs new material like a sponge. In this particular instance, she was just unhappy with the amount of homework she had cutting into the few hours she had at home before bedtime each night.

I gave her the same answer I’ve repeated to her several times. “You’ll eventually be finished with school, and it’ll then be your choice as to what you want to do from there. Many kids go on to college, where most of your classes will be in whatever subject you’re really interested in, and I hope you’ll do that. But I think no matter what, you’ll want to keep learning new things your entire life. Think of how boring life would be if you stopped learning anything new! Someday you’ll stop going to school, but education is something that should keep going for your entire life, whether you’re in school or not.”

And truthfully, I do believe education is a life-long endeavor. After all, since starting kindergarten at five years old, there have been just six years in my life where I wasn’t formally enrolled in a class in some way. (Yes, ONLY six years, and I’m 37!)

I went to college right out of high school, completing my four years and graduating with a BA in History, cum laude. I changed my major three times during those four years of college, mostly because I had too many interests and trouble deciding which direction I wanted to go.

After college, I immediately went into a Masters Degree program for History. However, halfway through the first year, I discovered my primary professor was planning a sabbatical for the next year, meaning I’d either have to take a year off from my program or choose a different focus. I quit the program before the year was up, choosing to work until I could determine what I wanted to do next.

A history degree isn’t exactly a perfect match for jobs in the real world, but my self-taught technical skills landed me a job in web design at a university library. I had been dabbling in HTML all through college (unofficial education), and that side-interest earned me a job.

I didn’t make it even six months before I decided I wanted to be back in school again. I applied for and was accepted in a Masters program for Theatre, specifically costume design and theatre history. I had also been working as a seamstress on the side, making costumes for our renaissance festival for myself and friends. I minored in Theatre in college, too, so theatre history was a good fit.

Thanks to my web design job, I had moved on to a job in online instructional design at that point, developing corporate e-learning courses for a private company. I worked from home for much of my time there, going above and beyond to meet and beat my deadlines while also taking graduate level courses in theatre history part-time, teaching Intro to Theatre classes to undergraduates every Friday morning, and serving as costume designer for one of the university’s plays that season.

I probably would have finished my MA, but after getting married in 2003 and then pregnant in 2004, we made the choice to move closer to family. I had planned to finish my degree remotely, since I was only a class and a thesis away, but the demands of work and baby pushed all of that to the back. I also realized at that time that I probably wouldn’t find a lot of jobs related to that degree.

It was just after Cordy was a year old that I got the idea to go back to school for nursing. When I was in college the first time, I considered going into pre-med. At 28 years old, I thought I was too old for pre-med, but still young enough for nursing school. My hope was that nursing would give me the job flexibility I needed for my family.

I started with the prerequisite courses first, and found them to be a breeze, giving me confidence that I could make it through nursing school. By the time I started my clinical courses, Mira had joined the family, so I was committed to a full course load, clinicals, and a preschooler and baby at home. (That was about the same time Cordy was diagnosed with autism, too.)

She liked my Chemistry bookCordy helped me study Chemistry back then

Was it easy? No way! It was probably the most intense period of my life. With all of the responsibilities on my plate, adding college into the mix was tricky. But I was passionate about the subject, which made it easier to stay up late doing homework while everyone else slept and study for exams with Dora the Explorer as background noise.

I graduated in 2009 and immediately got my RN license and a job. That wasn’t the best year for jobs in any sector, with the country in full recession, and I moved to another job in 2010 when it was clear that the birth center I worked at was going to close due to hospital budget cuts.

I worked two years at the next job, as a nurse and manager for a pediatric nutritional call center. My previous work experience prior to nursing helped me get the manager position, while my RN license got me in the door. It wasn’t the perfect job by any means, and I didn’t have the flexibility I was expecting in nursing. I considered going back to school for my BS in nursing, or possibly becoming a nurse practitioner.

It was in 2012 that I was abruptly let go when the company scaled back and got rid of the overnight shift entirely. I had been working when everyone else slept for three years, so I wasn’t sad to go back to the land of daylight.

Thankfully, through long-standing connections with blog friends, a job presented itself quickly and I jumped on it. Only it wasn’t nursing – I’d be back into the land of IT and computers. The position would challenge me with an ever-changing list of responsibilities, and required me to brush up on and grow my technical skills. I was ready for a new challenge and jumped at the chance.

Over a year and a half later, and I’m still in love with my job. It’s a position with variety, challenge, and the need to continue adapting to new products and situations. It’s also flexible and meets the needs of my family, too. While I haven’t gone back to school, I’ve spent a lot of time in self-study to improve my technical skills to be more useful for my company. And there’s a good chance I may eventually find myself enrolling in classes again to formalize and improve on my IT knowledge.

My nursing degree certainly hasn’t gone to waste – at the very least, it’s good knowledge to have for personal use. I take continuing education courses to meet the requirements of my license and keep it current, and if it wasn’t for the chain of events that ended with my previous nursing job, I wouldn’t be where I am now.

Nursing and IT are both hot fields to be in, and I’m glad to have experience and knowledge in both. Each step of my education has been valuable, including that BA in History from years ago. Working any job requires far more than just the basic skills listed on the paper – the whole person hired to work in that position can bring a wealth of unrelated, but possibly beneficial, skills to the job. I consider myself well-rounded.

My advice to my daughters will continue to be that education is never a waste. While it’s important to consider career potential, and consider the timing of when you’re seeking to improve your skills and knowledge, you’ll always have some benefit to education throughout your life. Who knows? Maybe I’ll decide to go for another degree in my forties?

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Filed Under: school, sponsored, the J-O-B ·


Nov 9, 2013

The Power of One Voice

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The election is over! Hallelujah!

Tuesday was probably one of the craziest days I’ve lived through in a long time. I woke up already worried about how the school levy issues would work out, but had to put it out of my mind for a couple of hours for an early morning dermatologist appointment. When I made that appointment months ago, I didn’t think Election Day would be that big of a deal.

My dermatologist appointment was for my twice-a-year full-body skin check. Since getting the lovely new scar on my back, I’m on the 2x/yr plan until further notice.

I didn’t expect the appointment to be very exciting, but yet my skin always finds way to surprise me. Two more moles biopsied, one of which I never would have thought would be an issue. So it’s another two week wait for results, and not the fun results that come with two blue lines on a stick.

After getting my band-aids and wound care instructions, I stopped by my polling location to vote before going home. I was the only person in there, and seemed to be disturbing the staff who were taking a snack break. I made my choices, carefully looked over them multiple times, and hit Submit.

Then I worked through the day, pushing out a few “go vote” messages here and there, and otherwise focusing on my job so I wasn’t an anxious mess thinking about the results.

That evening, I joined others in the ItsOKAYtoVoteNO group for an election watch party. I think we were all terribly nervous, completely uncertain how the race could go. We felt we had done our best in trying to get the message out that this school levy plan had serious flaws, and wasn’t the right plan for our children.

But we also had limited funds to expand our message. The pro-levy team had over $2 million, while our group eventually spent a couple hundred dollars or so before it was all done. Media time was not on our side either.

At 8:00pm they released the absentee and early voting results, which immediately put us in the lead. That lead wouldn’t disappear the entire night, and would only grow as the hours stretched on.

Election Watch Party We decided to take a group shot of many of the people involved behind the scenes (still missing 6-8 people in this photo).

When all was counted, the vote showed 69% against the levy. We were hoping to squeak out a win, but instead the voters delivered a powerful message against the levy. David slew Goliath.

Then it was over. The district and the mayor, who from the start told voters not to focus on the school board and instead remember this levy was coming from them and not the board, conceded by pushing the school board president – probably the most disliked person on the board – front and center to speak about the failure of the levy. It was cowardly.

Yes, we were pleased with the outcome.  We succeeded in not having this plan implemented, but even before this vote we realized this wasn’t an end, but only a beginning. Because defeating a levy and a bad plan wasn’t our end goal. Improving our district schools is the goal.

Isn’t it funny the strange paths our lives can take?

Just over a month ago, I was furious with our school district over their transportation failures. I had other issues with the current state of our district, and I wished our schools as a whole were stronger, but didn’t feel that was a topic I could do anything about.

And then a little PTA meeting happened, followed by my blog post about it, and suddenly there was hope that a small group of people – many of whom never knew each other before that meeting – could make a difference. Maybe a few people, motivated by doing the best for our kids, could use our few resources to promote an alternate message that this plan wasn’t the future, but maybe we could build a new ideal for our schools together.

Now, I’m working with some of that group on the next steps to create the positive change we hope to happen in our schools. We’ve got people talking, we have parents and community members engaged and wanting to join in, and we’re seeing that a small group of people with no political power might just get something done for our schools. Something that will benefit all of the kids and hopefully create a new dynamic for how to approach change in our school district.

It’s exciting. And terrifying. And exhausting. But mostly exciting.

The day after the election, I was proud to represent my group as the voice of the opposition on WOSU’s All Sides with Ann Fisher. Public speaking generally isn’t my thing, but radio is a little easier to do than TV, and I think I did fairly well at explaining what happened and where we planned to go from that point. We’re no longer “ItsOKAYtoVoteNO” but now “Parents for Real Education Reform in Columbus City Schools.” (PRERCCS kinda sounds like “prereqs” which was unplanned and kinda cool. Website coming soon.)

It really is just beginning. We succeeded in keeping the plan from being enacted, but now there’s a void that must be filled. So the work continues.

Never did I think that my voice could be so important.

Filed Under: politics, school ·


Oct 18, 2013

It’s Still Non-Fiction, Right?

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Four nights of the week, part of Cordy’s homework is to read a book for twenty minutes, then fill out a paper that asks her to summarize what she’s read. Two of those nights, it’s a fiction book. The other two nights are non-fiction.

It’s been a lot harder to get Cordy to do the assignment with non-fiction books. She’s far more interested in getting lost in the world of a fiction book than having to face the real world and all of its limitations.

A few days ago, I got the kids off the bus and we started the usual homework routine. I asked Cordy if she brought home a non-fiction book for her homework or if she needed my help to find one in our house. (Despite our overflowing bookshelves, it’s harder than you might think.) She enthusiastically said, “Oh yes, I have a GREAT non-fiction book for tonight. Here, I’ll show you!”

She ran to her backpack and dug through all of the books she insists on keeping in it every day. Then she pulled out a book triumphantly, walked back to where I was sitting, and proudly presented the book to me:

Dictionary - a non-fiction book?

A dictionary?

“Um, Cordy, I don’t think this is what your teacher meant by a non-fiction book…” I tried to explain.

My concerns over her choice of book sent Cordy into a fit of, “I can’t do ANYTHING right! I’m horrible at picking books and this homework is just TOO HARD!”

I calmed her down and tried to explain why her book wasn’t a good choice. “Your book isn’t fiction, but it isn’t really non-fiction, either.”

“Of course it’s non-fiction,” Cordy replied, “It’s a dictionary, and dictionaries only tell you about words that exist!”

At least I didn’t need to worry that she expected a coherent story from the dictionary.

And really, I couldn’t argue with her logic.

So I gave in. I told her she could use it for her non-fiction reading. She does four of these a week, every week. If she loses credit on one worksheet, it won’t be that damaging. Hopefully her teacher will find it amusing, too.

She read through her dictionary for twenty minutes (skipping around a bit) and later that night she completed her worksheet.

I’m especially fond of the main idea:

A worksheet about a dictionary

Perhaps, in the weeks ahead, her class will begin learning more about the select group of books known collectively as reference materials?

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Filed Under: Cordy, school ·