Week 5

My journal entry is a day late because I made an impromptu trip back home this weekend after my mentorship at Fishers and it was too long of a day to process everything that had happened in the past 24 hours. I will begin with my mentorship but a majority of this journal will be dedicated to another event.

I am so excited with how my mentorship went today because I feel so much more comfortable working with the students. Today in Intro to 3D, students were working on sketches for their totem pole project in clay. This is the first time I'm able to experience the very beginnings of a project, so it was nice to see the steps MS. O took to prepare students for it. She has them sketch a few thumbnail ideas, select the one they like the most, then they have to do a final sketch, with measurements, on a strip of paper that is 20 inches long which is how tall the actual project will be so they can visualize what it will look like in the end. I went around looking at sketches and asked them to tell me some of their ideas, which sketch they liked best, and some aspects of their project they felt would be the most difficult to pull off. I felt so comfortable and I was surprised at how willing they were to explain their ideas to me and problem solve with me. Some of them even came back to me to discuss new ideas they had after I left their table so that felt great! :) All the ideas were so unique from one another because again, this curriculum is based on identity, so every student was invested in representing what they know best; themselves! One girl is exceptionally talented in this class. She is a little rough around the edges, but she is one of my favorite students. This was her completed sketch with measurements of her project.

So she has a child and is planning on turning her totem pole into a lamp for his room when finished. Personally, I have a huge stigma against teen pregnancies because I believe that you should not be having sex unless you are able to handle the consequences or at least take the proper precautions to prevent said consequences, so I tend to be very unsympathetic towards teenagers with children, but this student is softening me up and changing my perspective. I talked to her about her sketch and how her dad is going to help her turn it into a lamp when the project is completed. I'm glad this project provided her an opportunity to love on her son because I'm sure many other teachers try and suppress that aspect of her life as I would have if I hadn't met her in all honesty. Ms. O even said to her in front of other students "I have real respect for you, having a job, going to school, while you have a child, and doing so well in my class!" and I think that was good for her to hear, and for me to hear as well, from a teacher.

I am still taking this semester to try out the projects with the students so I know exactly what the struggles are and how I can help them next school year. Like today I learned to enamel jewelry so I can help with the next project coming up. The enamel is the bluish green, glass-like stuff on my whale tale magnet. I'm just trying a variety of techniques on my little project so I know every method to connecting, embellishing, and finishing metal work. THIS LINK is my notes for the day.

As for now, I am really excited students feel comfortable enough to talk to me about their art! My next task is to learn student names! I have the seating charts for each class and I recognize everyone's faces so I'm going to work on learning their names.

Okay, now onto the other part of my journal. As I explained a little last semester, my mom has 20% function of her kidneys and will need to go on dialysis or find a donor very very soon. In the beginning of August 2016, she sent a letter to administration and her department director asking that she drop her color guard coach contract but keep her part time dance teacher contract. These are two separate contracts that legally have no correlation or binding to each other whatsoever. The music department just likes to keep them as one "job" since they are basically two 50% contracts and they feel it would be difficult to find someone to fulfill only one contract. She waited and waited for a response but got nothing. She personally spoke to the music director and crying, she told him the struggle she was going through to maintain her health while attending crazy rehearsal hours SHE IS NOT CONTRACTUALLY OBLIGATED TO FULFILL ( she did the math and subtracted the hours she IS required to fulfill as a color guard coach from the hours she actually spends at rehearsals and competitions and there are 180 hours unpaid for ). He looked at her and said "We all have our stuff. We need you at rehearsals." From that point on she silently just did what she wanted since he could not reprimand her for hours that are not in her contract. She has two other coaches that filled in on days she needed breaks so it's not like the students were left alone at practice, but this really put a stick into the director's side. She still had heard no response from administration and sent a followup letter. They claimed they had received no such initial letter. BS. She decided to get a lawyer because she could tell this was going to be a struggle. She fought and argued for them to at least post the color guard job and see if anyone would show interest. They posted the job with impossible requirements. In the posting it said the applicant needed to have a teaching license in a related area to color guard. ????? What license would be related to coaching an extracurricular activity??? The music department director did not post this job in any color guard websites or in any way use his relationships with hundreds of other band directors AND color guard coaches across Indiana, he didn't even tell the coaches that work with my mom that they should apply to be the director for color guard. So at this point it is six months after my mom has initially asked for accommodations DUE TO HER HEALTH and has asked if she can still receive insurance as a part time employee and administration and her own department head have done the absolute bare minimum (if it can even be called that) so they can avoid a lawsuit for violations against the American Disabilities Act, which my mom has threatened numerous times because of their inept behavior. All they needed to do was tell her yes or no, to whether or not she would still have insurance and it took them six months to finally respond this past Thursday basically stating, yes, you can still receive insurance as a part time employee but do not take this as you having a job secured for next school year and then posted BOTH of her contracts as one job on the school website without notifying her. This obviously stated indirectly that she was being fired from her job. So my mom did three things. She told her students exactly what was happening; she was being removed from her position because she had asked for accommodations due to her kidney disease. She did this so they knew exactly what happened and they would tell their parents and so there would be community outcry, not a silent wondering what happened to her. She then wrote this FaceBook post.

And then she wrote a very powerful, slightly sarcastic letter to the superintendent, the principal, the school lawyer, and the music department director. So she did all these things to show them that she will not go quietly and that she is a respected figure in the concord community and there will be outcry if she is removed. THEN, administration had the audacity to email her on Friday, yesterday, and say that they didn't appreciate her facebook post and to ask where she got the idea that she was being removed from her position. ARE YOU KIDDING ME. MAYBE FROM THE LETTER AND JOB POSTING? Who in the word do they think they are?? So now we are at a stand still. But this kind of stress is something that is negatively affecting my mom's health. The stress is making her sick. She keeps trying to let go and let whatever happens happen, but then they keep doing shit like this and jerking her from her "let it be" mindset. We are torn. Administration does not understand that if she is removed, literally the whole program will disintegrate before their eyes because they do not have the resources, connections, or experience that she has in order to pull off everything she does. When she leaves, everything will literally disappear. And when the program disappears it will be those at risk students that will suffer the consequences. My mom has quite literally transformed and SAVED lives in the past 8 years she has worked there. She has developed the only non-profit, college prep, dance program in Indiana and has 4 students go to college for dance and are now working in LA and Chicago. She has a national championship dance team while running a community outreach program for students to learn dance at extremely low or full scholarship tuition. The fact that administration and her own department chair that works with her everyday are blind to this is fucking maddening. But we are torn because if for some reason they keep her, she is now working in a hostile, un-empathetic work environment. Not one of her co-workers in the department or administration has asked "How are you?" She honestly believed that after she explained her health administration would go "So sorry to hear that, how can we help?" because that's what normal human beings DO.

So this has been a really emotionally distressing school year for my mom and our family. I need to do something at this point though. I have been refraining from entering this situation since I work for the school during the summers for color guard and I honestly don't want to stop working with those kids, but I also want to show support for my mom. So I am collecting the facebook comments form her post and I am going to print them out and mail them to the music department director, the principal, and the superintendent anonymously because if they honest to God can read these posts from her students, teachers at the school, parents, and people from the community and think that removing her is in the best interest of the school, I will have completely lost faith in the high school that made me want to be a teacher.

(you can click on the images below to read some of the comments from the community)