Teach for America (TFA) and other alternative teaching programs provide an invaluable service of providing teachers for hard to staff schools. These schools tend to have populations of students who are of color and/or living in poverty. Students in these schools are used to the teacher churn. Teachers come and go, or there is not…
If you would have asked me last school year what I would be doing this school year, I would have told you I would still be an elementary librarian. Apparently, some educators did not see that as a real teaching job. Yes, I’m no longer a librarian, but not because of those comments, but those…
I was the last hire of my school’s administration team. Everyone else had the entire summer to acclimate. I had less than two weeks. During that two-week time span, I went to the Bahamas for a family reunion cruise that was planned two years prior. Whatever is worse than drinking water from a fire hose…
Fierce student advocate and IPS resident La Meca Perkins-Knight has had enough. She resigned from the district where she has served for 13 years, an action she didn’t anticipate taking but believes is a necessary step to move her work forward. While in IPS, she served as a vice president of the Indianapolis Education Association….
November 2018, Rhondalyn Cornett resigned as union president of the Indianapolis Education Association (IEA) after being accused of mismanaging more than $100,000. Cornett has now pleaded guilty to embezzlement. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Cornett could spend up to 20 years in prison and pay a fine up to $250,000. The joint FBI and…
With the recent push for self-care, people have been encouraged to take mental health days to take care of themselves. Physical health is just as important as mental health, so wouldn’t students benefit from mental health days? Kate Brown, Governor of Oregon, signed legislation last month that will allow students to take mental health days…
For some reason, in education, we have a bad habit of repeating past programs but expecting different outcomes. Desegregation busing is a solution being touted again that I do not want to see repeated during my lifetime again or at any other point in the future. The desegregation busing debating came to the forefront during…
When I hear my parents and their siblings reminisce about their time in school during K-12, one common theme I hear was how many of them had the same teachers. Teachers did not change jobs much. They may even have retired from the school where they were first hired. Those days are long gone. Even…
If you ever see my resume or read my LinkedIn profile, you might notice a commonality between all the schools where I have been employed. I live on the northwest side of Indianapolis, and all the schools listed on my resume have either been on the northwest or west side of Indy with the exception…
We are in the prime of summer. The days are warm, and children are in the streets playing with their friends. Maybe, they are cooling off in the pool. With each passing day, we are a day closer to the beginning of the next school year. Instead of scrambling around at the last moment, get…