An Ally

There is an administrator level position in our district called the "Homeless Liaison". The person who holds this position now is an excellent advocate for children and his little closet office is a hop, skip, and jump down the hall from my classroom. He's much better than the last person that had the position and I've been very friendly to him all year. Well----he has become involved now in the whole situation with my student Jessie and I am so happy to report that things are looking up. He already made sure that Jessie can ride the bus again. I told him a little bit about my concerns with the YMCA evening program and how it is so tightly bound up with our after school program and he went off on this speech that fully voiced all my feelings---and just hearing him so strongly advocating for this child almost made me cry. Someone else cares about these kids, someone with some power. He'll probably even be at the meeting that Jessie's mom is required to have with Joann soon.

There are a couple of really hard parts about leaving Washington that I've been remembering: my baby plan, including having a strong student teacher take my class the last couple of months and having West High and Clara and daycare all so close, well that can't be the same anywhere else. Mr. Brown stayed at Washington through all sorts of Voldemort hell just cuz of his kid at West. There's also the new school---which I personally helped to design. My handprint is on that multi-million dollar building and I'd love to be there for a while. Not that I've forgotten why it's important to transfer---it's just that there really are these other considerations.