On Meeting the Higher Ups

I love Johanna, the woman who owns and runs Moonlight consulting. I want to be exactly where she is when I'm her age. Did I tell you that she gave me a "Moonlight Consulting" mug at the beginning of term and pronounced me, "part of the team." (I'm drinking out of it right now!)

A few weeks ago she called me with a really neat request. She wanted me to accompany her to a meeting with some of the higher up in the state department of education to present all of the standards based materials we put together. I was so excited.

The day came and I wore a great outfit. The Boy got out of work in order to bring me to the rest stop where I was meeting Johanna and we drove up to Santa Fe together. On the way up, we talked about the presentation and I got to see the first hard copy of what I created a month ago and that its pretty damn cool (of course, there are already things about it I want to make better.)

This might be the time to explain that I have always sort of idolized the people that work for the NMPED in a West-Wing-Aaron-Sorkin-does-the-state-department-of-education sort of way. I imagine them working for teachers and students, putting their all into it...you know, like Josh Lyman, CJ Criag and Toby Zeigler do in the best TV show ever. I like to think, in the end not only do I work for my own students, fellow teachers, parents and my principal, but also for these people. These people that are also supposed to be working for me. I always thought that working for a state public education department would be fab, top of the line, the best I could do kind of job, the place where the changes really happen. Well. Maybe it still would be, but from what I saw that day, it wouldn't be for the state of New Mexico.

We got there in good time. Introduced ourselves to the staff assistent and waited outside the offices. The building itself was a letdown in and of itself. It's shabby and falling apart. The inside is prettier, but still...just sad that that particular department is in such disrepair. Johanna told me that she wasn't going to take the elevator because ten or so years before she had gotten stuck in it for over and hour.

We were led into the offices of these people and began our presentation. I have to say, I was really disappointed. New Mexico is pretty low on the list of states with schools performing at or above AYP (yearly adequate progress) and so I imagined these people ready to embrace anything that would help the kids improve. They were not enthusiatic at all. They don't even have a list of resources that schools can go to in order to find help in upping their chances of meeting AYP. Bascially, they are just sitting up there making lists of schools that are not making AYP, not turning in certain forms and not helping schools do either.

Now I don't expect them to get all excited about every idea that people come in with. I'll admit I'm a little biased about ours because it's...well...it's amazing. It can help students and teachers at every level, including bilingual, special ed, gifted, native and ELL populations. We even have data to back it up. We didn't even get a "Wow, that sounds like an interesting program" or "hmm...I wonder if so and so would be intersted in hearing more about this." We got bland expressions and finally they offered to send someone to one of the presentations to further gauge their interest, but that was only after we pestered them for any kind of response and it was more like, "well...I suppose we could do that."

We got back in the car and Johanna said that she hoped they didn't send the one of the woman we were talking to, to a presentation that she (Johanna) was giving. I said, "No way, send her to mine, she won't know what hit her." I meant it.

I was disappointed by the whole thing. This meeting taught me that I'm not wrong to want vouchers for the kids that are in low proforming schools.