The Killed Messenger

Everyone at work is mad at me today.

One of the many weird jobs I have at work--jobs that have nothing really to do with technology--involves the school calendar. It is my responsibility to present to the Board of Education each year possible school calendar options for the following year. You know, when school starts, what week Spring Break is on, when our holidays are. That kind of stuff. The BOE then makes a decision based on those options. Sometimes they choose a calendar exactly as I've presented it. Sometimes they take one of the calendars and ask me to tweak it ("Let's move Spring Break to the following week." or "We're starting awfully early in August. Can we move it a few days later?"). In the end, though, THEY make the decision.

I tell everyone this every year, but no one hears me. I'm the one that creates the options, and I'm the one that informs the staff of what the Board decided (I've asked both the former and current superintendent if they wouldn't rather be the ones to inform the district, and they've both said that it was something I can handle. I think they both know better). And since I do those things, I'm the one that everyone gets angry at.

Last year, when I was creating options for THIS year, I noticed that Christmas was on a Friday. This presented a problem. Though there's no law against it, we can't realistically have school on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. That meant that the latest we could possibly go was Wednesday the 23rd. The teaching staff, though, typically wants two or three days before Christmas Eve to get ready for Christmas (though I've never understood why they're so insistent about this. Most other occupations don't get that much time off.). If I gave them the 22nd and 23rd off, though, that would leave only Monday the 21st for students to attend. That would be a bad idea. Many families just wouldn't send their students to school for that one day. If they had vacations planned, they'd leave on the 19th and wouldn't come on the 21st. So the only options, really, were to have the last day of school on the 18th and have a VERY long Christmas Break, or to have the last day on the 22nd and have a very SHORT Christmas Break.

I presented both options to the Board, fairly sure that they'd choose the 18th. Imagine my surprise when the Board chose the calendar with the short Christmas Break. When one of them made a motion to vote for the calendar, I actually did the very improper thing of stopping the motion to ask them if they didn't want to modify the calendar to lengthen Christmas Break before voting. Nope, they said. They were fine the way it was. And the calendar passed unanimously.

As far as I know, EVERY OTHER public school in Northern Kentucky had their last day on Friday. But not us. We're working today and tomorrow. And so this morning, NO ONE will be happy with me. I'm not even sure--based on how sullen people were Friday--if anyone will talk to me today. They're all mad at me.

And honestly, I'm mad at me, too.