Requiem For A Nightmare: Our School Secretaries Are Leaving

As of tomorrow afternoon, my school will go to Hell in a handbasket. Both of our administrative secretaries are retiring.

In other words, the two people who do the most work, know more about any facet of the school operation and have served as the singular glue preventing the whole place from figuratively and literally collapsing are headed out the door.

I think I speak for the staff when I say we are shuddering collectively at the prospect. I wish I could say that I/we are kidding.

A teacher's reliance on a good administrative secretary is immense. It is not an overstatement to say that the quality of secretary has more to do with the quality of a school than any single teacher on campus. In fact, a great secretary can even make up for a bad principal.

I imagine many non-teachers out there are scoffing at the above paragraph. Tellingly, my guess is that very few, if any, teachers would disagree with the above paragraph.

Let's look at the job description for a "Secretary III" , whose starting pay, by the way, is $11.00 an hour:

Requires a High School Diploma or GED. Valid New Mexico Drivers License with liability insurance. Responsibilities may include: updates Computer Database, maintains accounting on APS Purchase Cards; works with a high of volume of accounts (both Activity and Operational), accounts for actual money at work sites, places orders and tracks them on the Financial System, monitors Payroll, composes and creates intricate documents as needed, serves as a point of contact for information dissemination, completes/prepares for special projects/detailed work in a timely manner, participates in development, implementation and maintenance of databases, analyzes information, makes travel arrangements, prepares and distributes reports, correspondence and other documents, provides substitute coverage for any secretarial/clerical position within the B Salary Schedule, provides training for other secretarial/clerical positions within the B Salary Schedule, maintains and updates files and records, schedules and arranges for meetings, maintains a complex filing system, schedules and maintains calendars, works with diverse populations, monitors supplies/materials and equipment for office and receives and orders materials, monitors annual equipment inventory. Preferences include: three to four years of secretarial/clerical experience, business School Training, excellent interpersonal skills, word processing skills, knowledge of operation and capabilities of PC and associated software (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, etc), exercises initiative and judgment in making decisions affecting work procedures, excellent Telecommunication Skills, excellent Problem Solving Skills, works independently with little or no supervision, self motivator, ability to effectively and independently handle a number of tasks/projects at one time, Working knowledge of Lawson Financial System and of Student Information System preferred, skill in responding to special request, extensive knowledge of modern office practices and procedures, effective communication skills, both verbal and written, flexibility, organization, decision-making and problem solving skills, interpersonal skills with diverse populations in-person and on the telephone, proficient with word processing, database, spreadsheet and/or other software as required by supervisor, ability to meet deadlines and work on multiple projects, computer, business English and basic mathematics skills, ability to accurately keyboard 50 WPM minimum.

And, like most official job descriptions, the giant blob o' text above doesn't capture the reality of the position. Copier broken? It's the secretary's job to fix it herself (and the overwhelming preponderance of school secretaries are women), or call it in to the copier company. Didn't get paid for that after-school program? Talk to the secretary. When is the fire alarm going to be? Ask the secretary. School short on subs today? Get the secretary to make repeated, increasingly desperate pleas over the intercom for teachers to cover the missing periods. No teacher for today's lunch detention? Get the secretary to do it. Where's the principal and assistant principal today? The secretary says they are at a training and there's nobody in the office. So who is handling discipline?

You guessed it...the secretary.

The role and pay of school secretaries is one of those nasty little injustices, nasty because we all know it's there, but try to avoid thinking about it. Added to this is the observable fact that, at least in APS, salary decreases the more Spanish you know. Finding teachers who speak Spanish is very difficult, and those who do are held onto for dear life.

School secretaries are de facto required to speak Spanish (although you may note it's not in the job description), and often end up not only talking to Spanish-only students/parents all the time, but serve as impromptu translators at meetings.

All of this for a starting salary of $11.00 an hour, and that's for a Level III secretary. A Level II starts at $9.62.

And now our two secretaries, who have valiantly held the school together for years, are leaving in tandem. We're having a little going away party for them tomorrow, but it's really more of a wake for the staff. At this point, I don't think we're quite able to psychologically handle the situation. We need a funeral to wake up to the fact they are gone, and that come Tuesday morning, nobody will be able to tell us where the master key to the building is, or what the bell schedule is for the assembly, or where little Johnny ran off to before 7th Period, or the answer to any of the other three billion questions an established school secretary handles in a typical day.

I think I can again speak for the staff of my school when I say: gulp.

Bon voyage school secretaries, you have performed valuable services for years while being paid a ridiculously low salary. In a perfect world, everyone would know how important you are. In the very, very imperfect world of our school, it will be a long, long time before we recover from your absences.

A Proposed Addition to Our List of School-Day Wasting Assemblies

Remember, dear Babble reader, our discussion of a couple weeks back regarding wasted school days? I'd like to nominate another candidate: the Magazine Salesman Fundraiser Assembly (MSFA).

My first brush with this one happened yesterday, and it will take many, many mental showers before I feel anywhere close to ethically clean again.

Here's how it went down: in a shortened academic day, students spend 40 minutes at a assembly listening to a super-fast talking guy from the Hearst Corporation who flies through a crash-course in selling magazine subscriptions. Central to the spiel are two things

• If every student can sell just three magazine subscriptions the school will be able to buy an electronic marquee instead of the old plastic-letter model we currently have;
• Students who sell a certain number of magazine subscriptions will be eligible for fabulous prizes, such as a dinky little radio besparkled with shiny multi-colored lights, and a mp3 player (again, besparkled with shiny, multi-colored lights). Brightly-colored objects are evidently a central marketing focus of the Hearst Corporation, magazine-shilling division. Yellow-journalist de luxe William Randolph Hearst would be oh so proud.
  

And what of the electronic marquee itself? Well, it's quite obvious that without this $17,000 informational gadget, my school will:

1. Doubtlessly miss AYP forever
   
2. suffer the irreversible loss of a student body increasingly unable to handle a school that doesn't have announcements such as "Band Concert Friday; No School 9/2" in blazing LCD letters visible from three miles away.

So, while we're shortening academic classes for the day, our nascent teenage students are being pummeled Ronco Informercial style into shilling overpriced magazines via the appeal of cheap electronics and a pointless, Keeping Up With the School Joneses, electronic gadget that costs $17,000.

In a 14-year plus career of watching time-wasting, ethically-challenged assemblies, I can't think of one that quite matched the depressive power of the Magazine Salesman Fundraising Assembly. True, any assembly termed a "pep rally" comes close, but for sheer misguided capitalism and pointlessness, the magazine salesman fundraising assembly is without peer.

I have to go take another one of those mental showers now.

TIRA: An Ugly Oil Shale Photograph Many Won't See

-Eamon Mac Mahon, Associated Press

Or in this case, "TIDRA": Things I Didn't Run Across.

I've always been interested in the more subtle forms of press censorship, in particular the gatekeeping role played by local newspapers. The photo above accompanies an Associated Press story by Rob Gillies entitled "Critics: Canada's Oil Boom an Environmental Bust". I came across the story at the Seattle Times website this morning, and that picture just about made me lose my breakfast. It's about the mad, earth-scarring dash to find and process oil from shale.

The power of the photograph (and, btw, I would really like to have Mr. Mac Mahon's permission to post the photograph here, and even called AP in Washington, but couldn't get in touch with anyone, and, besides, this is kinda of a "media studies" posting, so the copyright thing gets a little hazy, and that's my story and I'm sticking to it)...oh yeah, back to what I was saying. The power of the photograph made me wonder how many newspapers across the country were running this story.

I did a little Google News check (admittedly, far from conclusive) combined with a back-and-forth search of individual papers via newsvoyager.com. Tons of newspapers around the country are posting the story. But two things are kinda interesting...

1. Many newspapers, at least online, aren't posting the photograph along with the story.
2. In the Intermountain West of the United States, where the oil shale boom matters most, few newspapers are posting the story at all. I found three so far (readers are encouraged to look and find more): the Denver Post, Las Cruces Sun-News, and Provo, Utah Daily Herald.

For instance, I can't find the story at all on the Albuquerque Journal website (and I know you're laughing out loud right now and saying "well Hell, that's not surprising..nobody can find anything on that website!). Well, I looked all I could and got nothing. I also looked at papers in Missoula, Bozeman, Billings, Casper, and Laramie, and didn't find a thing.

Well...what do all these flimsy "facts" mean? That's there some sort of vast oil & gas developer conspiracy going on that directly/indirectly leads local news organizations to avoid negative stories about oil shale, and squashes dissemination of provocative photos that show how destructive oil shale can be to Mother Earth?

Uh....yeah. That's what it means...at least to me. Your conspiracy mileage may vary.

More generally, I would humbly suggest that we, as a people and as "bloggers" do some systematic investigations of the more subtle forms of self-imposed press censorship. I realize that the age of the local newspaper is largely over. One can already almost literally smell the nitial stages of decomposition in the near-corpse that is the Albuquerque Journal, for instance.

Still, we need to do a better job of analyzing how the news is being neatly packaged for our consumption, more now than ever as the number of news outlets dwindle. One can't have watched the Beijing Olympics and avoided at least a passing thought about the Chinese government's stifling of information. One wonders how close we already are to the Chinese situation here, and how much closer we might get to that in a world seen by our leaders as one big counter-insurgency battleground and a shrinking independent media.


P.S.: And I wonder what the impact of the photo above might have on public policy discussion of oil shale exploration if it were shown on every TV newscast in the country at least once. No, it wouldn't be equivalent to the Tienanmen Square "guy in front of tank shot"...but it would have an impact.

A Public School Teacher Reflects Upon School "Counselors"

Every organization has strangely named departments, job titles and such, but you can't beat public education when it comes to bizarrely misnamed occupations.

School "Counselor" for instance.

Now there probably was a time, way back in the hazy John Dewey past when school counselors actually counseled students about things like where to go to college, or how to best deal with the bully in the school cafeteria. But for years now public school "counseling" (at least at the schools I've worked at) has devolved into a bureaucratic data-entry position centered around creating/changing student schedules.

I've had the pleasure to work with some fabulous folks who are school counselors, and in every case these people took the position hoping they could help young people emotionally navigate the long dark, stormy journey through K-12 education, but found themselves spending hours upon hours upon days upon semesters punching dispassionate schedules and schedule changes into painfully glitchy District computer software.

Outside of the countless hours plodding through schedules, there's little time for anything other than the occasional "parent conference", at which bad little Johnny is forced to sit at a large table with really tired teachers who are pissed off they have to attend this stupid conference, a parent invariably glaring at Johnny with a look combining exasperation and violence, and the counselor who tries to de-escalate the anger and violence through a combination of "we want to use I statements today" and "Johnny, we're not here to attack you, but to see how we all can help".

Now I have to admit I've never been a school counselor, so I'm not 100% sure every public school counselor has their days 100% filled in such a manner. But from talking to some school counseling friends, and seeing them in action a lot over the years, I'm about 99.7% sure the job sucks.

Now being trained as counselors, these people are expert at keeping a sunny disposition despite their job conditions. Most of them are amazing at it, even when the few remaining seconds in their work day are filled with hearing stories about Parent X beating up Student Y, Family Z moving from hotel to hotel along Central because the police is chasing them, and other tales of horror and woe.

All of this is to say:

1. I would never want to be a school "counselor" in a million, billion years;
2. The great majority of school "counselors" are amazing people who are so altruistic and helpful that they stay in their counseling jobs despite the fact that little or no "counseling" is performed in them;
3. There is the chance in a job so awful that a counselor will succumb to the horrible drudgery of constant scheduling/pitiful "parent conferences", and go, for lack of a better description, kinda like Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now" becoming a crazed, power-mad, bureaucratic tyrant.

As you might have guessed, it is #3 above that has led your humble blogger to address the issue of school "counselors". And yes, there is a more personal story being hidden within the text of the paragraphs, a personal story filled with outrage, anger and a strong desire to impale certain humans upon the same sort of ragged, pointy spike employed by Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now".

But, having had the chance to think about the mis-titled job of "school counselor" for a few hours, and the friends/acquaintances over the years who have vainly tried to put some counseling in that awful position, I've think I'll just skip a long tirade on the subject of #3 above, and merely relate my commiseration with the difficulties of being a school "counselor".

To be stuck desparately wanting to emotionally help young people, yet chained to a desktop computer punching in "4th Period, Social Studies; 5th Period, Typing; 6th Period, Language Arts....." ad infinitum must be its own version of Col. Kurtz final words....

"The Horror......the horror......."



Have a good weekend, everybody.

That Very "Special" Guv/Legislative Rebate II: With Friends Like This...

Now we all know why the Governor/New Mexico Legislature really wants to magnanimously give us New Mexicans some money. I guess I'd have more friends too, if only I would tell everyone I was giving them fifty bucks. I get that. But...

I'd definitely have me some dumb new friends if I recruited these friends via the following strategy:

"Hey, why don't you all put a bunch of money in this hat, and then I'll go through the hat a few months from now, figure out a small percentage of your money that I don't need, and then give that small percentage back to you in a slow, overly complicated process designed to make me look like a really great new friend?"

Now since this "be my friend, here's fifty bucks" strategy is supposedly based on a heartfelt need to help working families and the poor better afford higher priced gasoline and food, might it not be better sense to just lower the taxes on these things before everybody puts a bunch of money in the State's hat?

I did literally seconds of intense research this morning, and discovered this web page breaking down gasoline taxes by State. From that I see New Mexico tacks on an additional 18 cents or so a gallon on top of the federal 18 cents a gallon.

Now many of us remember the oft-discussed stupid idea to have a federal "gas tax holiday" during the early days of Gas Price Horror '08. But, stupid as that idea may be, it's nowhere near as stupid as:

"Hey, why don't you all put a bunch of money in this hat, and then I'll go through the hat a few months from now, figure out a small percentage of your money that I don't need, and then give that small percentage back to you in a slow, overly complicated process designed to make me look like a really great new friend?"

Thanks friend. Thanks.

P.S.: Now I know that the pain of higher gas/food prices is most felt by the poor and that these "be my friends" initiatives are most important to them. But how about this idea: since it's gonna cost $750,000 (supposedly) just to disburse the rebate money, let's instead divide that $750,000 figure amongst all New Mexico EBT (food stamps) recipients, plug that money into their EBT accounts (a process that would take about two seconds...well, at least I would think it would take about two seconds) and be done with it. I see that the state has94,593 food stamp recipient families. $750k would only be about $8 per family.

Now granted that's too small, but that's just the cost of distributing this stupid rebate money. And it would free up all the Tax and Rev folks up in Santa Fe to think of a combination of tax decreases to really help these families, instead of spending all their time writing and sending out multiple, multiple, multiple mailers telling us how friendly our Guv/Legislature is.

Your New Mexico Legislature: Now That's "Special"!

My moratorium on any news of a political sort is going pretty well, but I made the big mistake of seeing a "report" last night on the just-concluded special session.

It must have been exceedingly "special".

Our "rebate" for the horrors of high-priced gasoline:
Up to $30,000 a household...you get fifty bucks (plus $50 for each dependent)
and if I read it right, up to $70,000 you get twenty-five bucks...

All this specialness has me wondering:

• I wonder what the administrative costs of doling out these piddly amounts will add up to;
• I wonder if we'll get the same series of five separate mailers telling us: 1. Announcement: A rebate is coming; 2. Announcement: Here's how you will get your rebate; 3. Announcement: Your rebate should be here any day now, really!; 4. Announcement: Did you get your rebate? Because we're not so sure; 5. Apology: Here's why your rebate wasn't for as much as you thought it would be, and the obscure office to file a time-wasting grievance.
• I wonder if we'll have that same stupid tax problem we had with the last lame "rebate" (remember that?);
• I wonder what the average New Mexican thinks of paying legislators $144 a day per diem to give us fifty bucks, or twenty-five bucks;
  
• And I wonder what combination of psychotropic drugs Senator Shannon Robinson is on these days....for even with my cone of political news silence firmly placed above me I have been unable to avoid hearing/reading some of the incredibly stupid things coming out of his mouth in recent weeks. So to read his comment in today's New Mexican...

"The only consensus we reached in the caucus the other day was that we really don't like each other all the time," Robinson said.

has a special warped poignancy that reminds me that I really need to keep this political news moratorium in place for as long as possible.

A Middle School Rhapsody in Blue: Cops On Campus

Even after only a few days of the new school year, it's quite obvious that the big change at my school, Jefferson MS, is the ubiquitous presence of our two new school cops. These guys, one of whom is wearing a gun (a fact noted by every student with a combined sense of awe and disapproval), have an uncanny ability to be everywhere, like they have mirrors or clones or something.

To be honest, they kinda freak me out.

Personally, I've never been one to dislike or distrust the police. I've been lucky to have not had any real interactions with them over the years, and generally support their presence (especially along 2nd Street S.W. when everybody is flying down the 30 mph section at 55 mph and I'm getting run over as I go the speed limit).

But having two of them in my school has me torn. I'd be lying if I said the school didn't feel "safer" with these ever-present guys in blue scary uniforms all over the place. I absolutely HATE little kids getting picked on, and there's nothing like armed law enforcement to reduce the number of wedgies and noogies. During our between period "hall duty", I've already discerned a drop in the need for me to really do anything. A simple "there's a guy with a gun down the hall right now, stop doing X" seems to do the trick every time.

At the same time, there's a guy with a gun down the hall inside my school. Our answer to crazy people and the hyper-publicized, ultra-rare occurrence of deadly school violence has been to throw more guns at the issue. The atmosphere of my school has changed from slightly chaotic and mischievous to calmer and more weapon-obsessed.

It's like we've decided we can't cope, and have to start taking the medication. It's hard not to feel like R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, surrounded by the medicated and the medicators, while everyone mouths expressions like "it sure is good to have these cops on campus!"

Maybe that feeling will change, and the newness of cops wearing guns at Jefferson MS will become unremarkable, but right now there's an undercurrent of resentment and vague depression noticeable among some of the students and many of the staff on the issue. Or maybe that's just me projecting my own ambivalence onto everyone. Hard to tell, as right now it's informally un-cool to say anything negative about the cops on campus thing, and that de facto censorship is a drag in itself.

Meanwhile, in lighter "guns on campus" news, those fun-loving Texans (always good for a laugh or two in these matters) are looking to a bigger, broader solution: gun-toting teachers.

"Little Johnny....are you gonna stop talking in class, or do I need to go to my desk and pull out that 357 magnum?"

Debate Team Recruitment Film #1: Debate As Drunken Fight Outside Bar at 2 A.M.

**Update Note 8/18/08 7:20 P.M. MDT: It's been a long, uncommonly popular day here at 'ol Burque Babble. Between being linked by real web sites with actual traffic and such and other web sites that aren't quite as famous, but still have 100,000 times more traffic than this little blip on the Internet Superhighway, we've been visited by aliens, viral cruisers, the depraved and the inquisitive. In other words, your typical "tubes" crowd.

Meanwhile, the linked video below has been pulled by its YouTube originator..I'm still somewhat looking for a suitable replacement, but my heart isn't really in it. Time to move on, Internet masses, time to move onto the next shiny object, mooning its audience or otherwise. Thanks for playing.


***NSFW Caution: Burque Babble tends to be one of those PG blogs where saying "Hell" and "Damn" is fine, but unfettered f-bombs and obscure nudity is not. After all, I'm a middle school teacher with a reputation to uphold, for Shiva's sake. But the video below is about Debate (well, kinda) and we're using this fact as lame justification to throw our established social propriety out the window. Let it be known that Burque Babble will return to its high, high standard of propriety in future postings, unless, that is, we find something that combines obscure nudity with policy debate. NSFW Caution***
____________________
We're starting a new ultra-low maintenance feature here at Burque Babble. It's called "TIRA" or "Things I Ran Across".

The idea is to provide a venue for me to spread meaningless information I discovered during my hours of wasteful Internet activity, without having to expend any real energy "writing" about them.

For this week's inagural issue of TIRA we have a YouTube video of two people yelling obscenities at each other. It also includes a "mooning", some pushing and varied body gestures that kinda reminds one of Mr. Bean meets Martha Graham.

No, it's not a video taken from an Albuquerque City Council meeting or the teacher's lounge at Jefferson Middle School, but does feature supposedly erudite "professionals" caught doing all this in a workplace setting of sorts. As I understand it, the scene is Emory University in Atlanta and stars debate coaches from the University of Pittsburgh and Fort Hays State College in Kansas. These two academics are evidently having a post-round discussion of the finer points in the round they have just witnessed.

As one who has "coached" debate in the past at the high school level, and always make sure to include plenty of formal debates as part of his middle school Humanities classes, I can't help but think to myself as I watch the video below: "hmmm..maybe I should be a college debate coach".



I ran across this little bit o' improv primal scream therapy while looking for test scores in Wichita last week. As you might expect, not everyone in Kansas is enamored with the idea of having its taxpayer-funded college debate coaches acting like this. The story has gone national (YouTube virals as "news") and claims of everything from racism to Marxism have resulted.

Maybe I should be a college debate coach. I like the university dress code policy in particular.

Enjoy your weeds-gone-wild fecund, rainy Sunday everyone.