Christmas Dayi

I can feel the crunch of the ice below my feet as I walk the pasture to chase down the cows on the hillside.

I mean, if I stayed farming, if I was calm through the whole thing, then I'd certainly be fat and chubby.

Maddie asked, "Do you want some cereal, Jeremy?"

His young eyes didn't know what to make of the new order of business. But he just shrugged his mental shoulders and moved forward.

Chapter 16

SCHOOL DAZE
On Monday, December 1, I was involved in the IEP Due Process meeting along with Mr. Hartnett. During this meeting, my frustrations grew because of the following situations. When asked to discuss and evaluate the student’s IEP goals and objectives with the foster parents, Mr. Hartnett spoke in generalities rather than give specific details. Mr. Hartnett did not discuss the student’s past history that led to the student’s due process transfer from one middle school to Morton. After the IEP discussion was complete, I had to suggest to Mr. Hartnett that the IEP may need to be updated to meet the current needs of this student. When it came time for the foster parents to sign off on the IEP, Mr. Hartnett handed the foster parents the IEP of another student in his class. Mr. Hartnett’s supervisor, Dr. Joyce Cramer had to take the IEP document from him so that it could be completed.
Stephen F. Maher, Student & Community Services


Late afternoon Frison strode into the storage area—now classroom—unannounced. Enrollment jump placed a premium on classroom space. The sixteen portables—homely off-white doublewide trailers—that stood in rows of three, in rectangle formation, were full.
They’d yet to decide what to do with the large empty classroom next to me, vacant since first quarter.
As part of the “least restrictive environment” mindset, the smaller space was to help keep the students--who were apt to run out the door rather than listen to instruction or redirection.
I sat at my desk and looked over. The first-year principal’s large frame filled the doorway. While the small classroom was not in bedlam or uproar, the BD students weren’t paying to awful much attention to what they had to do or what I had to say. Principal Frison—who took Doug’s place—had caught them in something of a lull before the next storm—when demands and denials would arise like dust.
It didn’t take long
Rojay, a tall black student, who’d had his head buzzed over the weekend with a nearly indistinguishable emblem on the right side of his scalp, sat stoically, slouched down, long thing legs splayed across the floor, the middle finger of his right hand in his mouth, his long legs were sticking out in the aisle of the small classroom. This prevented easy passage.
Duty bound, heightened by first year “building principal” (yes, I still had a fondness for the terms tossed about in education-ease, especially when it came to being the principal. Instructional leader. Change-maker. Decision-maker. All highly theoretical and I loved hearing it, using those words. Little did I realize, getting my EDAD (Education Administration) endorsement, that I’d be the butt of all jokes, “the marginal teacher,” the one you had to watch out for then get rid of), the square-shouldered black lady—a large Ophra—handed me yellow, large and sealed Intercommunication envelope.
Immediately, I knew the contents. Deb—and it’s how she liked to be addressed—had observed me three times the last six weeks in the classroom. She’d also sat in on a couple IEP conferences. This, of course, was new. I couldn’t remember Sam or Lou Lou or Vickie or even Mitchell sitting in on a conference. This was an entirely new horizon when it came to observation.
The assistant principals Mrs. Wakin and Bruce—and it’s how they liked to be addressed—had visited an equal amount of times. Nine visits in six weeks—the mental scales were again mounted to an ear-splitting crescendo.
Triumvirate reports, if unanimous, I knew, were not favorable.

“This is the evaluation summary,” she said, voice resonant with officialdom. Deb’s first year as school principal: overkill far better than under.
Besides, I was a teacher in trouble. Who can’t walk the iron.
“Read it over,” she advised, “and we can go over it tomorrow. What’s your plan, 3rd period?” she said, answering her own question.
“Uh, um, hm.” I really didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. “Yeah, I think so,” acceding to her words by instinct.
She had received confirmation.
“Ok, we’ll see you then.”
“Sure, no problem.”
I harked back to the Indian reservation. First written formal rebuke. I watched the Ed Supervisor’s fingers move dissatisfaction from keys to the screen, a slow murmur, a slight rumble, a slight twitch across the brow like when 20+ years ago from the hospital report—“he responded only to painful stimuli on the left arm when poked and prodded with a sharp instrument but did not move the right extremities or the left leg.”
This time, I could watch: I was conscious and the incisions were sharp. How ‘d I feel this time, watching the operation? I felt a slight amount of disdain, a large amount of fear, a spoonful of hope—people poking over me to set me straight henceforward.
Two decades removed, they'd again dialed up the recovery channel.
“Get busy, Rojay." I tried to sound authoritative and businesslike—a key time with the principal in the room to demonstrate mastery, invincibility. Rojay—his heard turned to the boy in back of him—made no indication that he would respond.
Rojay’s not a bad kid. None of my BD kids are. They just don’t have much control over their impulses. Is it not how he’s learned to negotiate his own river of time? He’ll get up and go where he wants to, when he wants to. Easily influenced others followed Rojay like lemmings to the sea.
He’s the kind Generation Y kid that could easily set out on the old frontier and settle. They could stake a claim; especially if there was a McDonald’s close by.
“Rojay,” I called again, feeling Frison’s eyes scanning the small field in front of her, raising his voice an octave, “let’s get going.”
“Huh, what?”
He turned his attention from back of the room. He took a long finger out of his mouth and fixed me with a blank gaze. “I don’t know what I’m ‘sposed to do.”
“It’s right in front of you.”
Rojay, God bless him, then uttered the phrase that crippled, further sealing my doom. “I don’t understand it,” Rojay said. “I’m frustrated.”
Deb exited stage right with trumpets sounding, heeding not the “thank you” I’d issued to a dark blue jacket. I looked at the envelope on my desk. The summation, in a large manila container, was certainly not the first. In fact, I reckoned that in forty or so months, I’d at least ten evaluation summaries from three principals in two buildings. I know it’s full U’s for unsatisfactory in each category, just like before, Mr. Ed. Nightmare coming back to haunt and taunt.
For protection, I stick the envelope in my drawer.
“What don’t you understand, Rojay?”
Of course I wasn’t going to read it. Why should I? None of us understand.
Scates and Co.—he’d moved up to union president “in the District”—weren't as forthcoming. I was on my own.
In fact, the white male principal, Doug Kyles, who had nary an Unsatisfactory for me, had moved West.
I thought again how Doug put it. “We had some disagreements,” Doug had said regarding Vickie Vaughn. She came to my classroom after I was reinstated for observations and played much the same tune as before. “She saw things her way; I saw things my way.”
Even Mackiel had said, after I was done with my first intervention, “If we get the right pieces together, I think it will work.”
But now I heard my name over the loud speake: could I see the principal in her office?
I walked in. As usual, I was told to shut the door.
Deb began, getting right to the point. “I heard you had an accident,” she said, v. honest and v. direct.
“And your file at personnel, well, I don’t think it’s ever been cleared up. Somebody dropped the ball. I’m not going to drop the ball,” Deb said, both hands on her desk in the office, a slight bead of sweat protruding from her upper lip. “There are some areas of concern. You just tell me what you need and I’ll see that you get it. We’ll do anything we can to see that you’ll make it.”
I wanted to enjoin: are you related to Dr. Mitchell?
I knew from before that these were not assurances, but warnings. “Let us know if we can help you with anything,” the first flag.
What it means is they’ll give me what they can, based on the matter at hand..
And now, I was again stuck interminably as a BD teacher. Once again, I couldn’t transfer. For Frison, I had six weeks to get the classroom act together—Informal Intervention—or else Formal Intervention would again rear it’s ugly multiheads.
Formal Intervention was a cuss word: 132 observations later from six different people four out of the five years of teaching at Omaha Public Schools and I was back to square one.
I shared my concerns with Kath.
“I don’t see how I can go through it again, honey?
“Well, what does the union say?”
“Well, just like before. Tom Scates said they can put me on formal intervention. Just have to sit down and work on those areas we need to address.”
“God, they are so mean,” Kath said, putting a bib over Brendan and sitting him up in his high chair. “Why can’t they just lay off. I told you when Doug was gone it’d be different. You should’ve tried to transfer last year to teach English because you were off formal intervention.”
“Yeah, I told you I should. But I wanted to be faithful to Doug and be his BD teacher for the next year.”
“Yeah, right. And now he’s gone.”
I pondered the dilemma. Where had I gone wrong this time?
“Yeah, what set her off?”
“Oh, that conference.”
“What conference?”
“Remember, that kid’s natural mother came unexpectedly. Had missed her appointment for a couple weeks then showed up.”
Frison didn’t like the way I said Tony hasn’t done any of the assignments but then, the last couple days has done a couple.
“’You need to have all that written down,’” she said. “’That needs to be reflected in the grade book.’”
“Oh yeah.”
“I want it in my office first thing in the morning,” she said after Tony and his mom had left.
Of course, I don’t know where it’s at. A couple new kids came in, two had left. It was hard to keep track.
I reminded her that I didn’t have a plan time all day for the first six weeks of school

And, as before, I felt like been take advantage of to a degree. The no plan time made it impossible to keep up.
“But why didn’t you let Scates know this?”
“Oh, I did. He even came to the school. But it’s somethin’ like if the no plan time wasn’t intentional then they could say that it was an oversight more than anything.”
“It sure didn’t help you none.”
“And then Scates said I could pursue it if I wanted to. But you know me, let bygones be bygones.”
And, because I was never formally released from intervention in the first place, that had now been on-going for over three years—an official TAC meeting at Personnel like Dave to signal it was over. I remembered how Dave had told med it was both brief and joyous. “They just said ‘You’re off formal intervention. Let us know if there’s anything we can do for you.’”
This must’ve been what Frison was talking about. I had no such meeting. Year #5 at “the District” I again felt watched, hounded, pilloried.
Again, I was grasping at straw. People coming in my classroom, sitting down, and starting to write.
Through the Omaha Head Injury Group, which I’d fallen into as the by-product of Linda Burkey, I was aware of an important meeting. There was a bill before the Nebraska Legislature that would help those who’d suffered a debilitating injury to return successfully to the work force.
The large amphitheatre room at Alegent Hospital where I’d had my fun day with Rankin and assistant File was full.
After Dan Lynch, whose son is barely able to navigate his own river of time, confined to a wheelchair, his voice, like many head injury participants, slurred by the medication, spoke of the need for such a bill to be given a hearing and put into law.
As for me at the meeting, I thought of the Eliot poem: How should I proceed and how should I begin?
“Well hell, might as well state my case.”
I stood up before a crowd of canes and wheelchairs and ambulatories. I saw a young woman pushing the wheelchair of a cop, who’d been shot in the spine, losing his ability to walk, to the front of the room.
“Well, I’ve been teaching at OPS for five years. I’m a Resource Room teacher, fifth year, tenured, yet still people won’t get off my back. And now,” I could feel a sea of eyes upon me, “and I still can’t get past this Formal Intervention. I’ve been to two neuropsychologists and they said I shouldn’t be teaching Special Ed but there I am still having the same problems.”
I paused. “I’m just trying to hold on to a steady teaching job and support my family. But if I go on intervention again I don’t know how I’ll make it through the entire year.” I felt like I was rambling. “I just hope that we can do something.”
A few more got up and listed their grievances.
“Yes, it’s true, if you get hurt in Nebraska, the next step is poverty,” a lady said. Her husband had an accident on the farm. His problem yet persisted but the farm was gone.
“The disability benefits are so low, you can end up in poverty,” she said. “Like it was somehow your fault that some drunk driver smashed into you.”
The speakers adjourned and I talked with the farm wife who was in charge of the volunteer organization the I’d called a couple times to find out who would help me, what I could do when first landed on FI.
She was smiling and reassuring. “That’s Jim over there. You should talk to him. He’s in charge of Voc Rehab office in Omaha.”
I hustled over. Linda Burkey said that maybe you could help me.”
“Oh yes, I enjoyed hearing what you had to say.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“So you’re a teacher at OPS?”
“Yep. For awhile, I guess.”
“Well,” a tall well-dressed Jim began, looking down at him. “I’m going to have someone call you,” he said. “Her name is Pramila, an agronomist, and she really does some wonderful things, really good luck getting people to hold down a job. It sounds like you’d qualify and she’ll set up some job coaching.”
Driving home, I was cheered by this. Now I would have both the teacher union and Voc Rehab help get things squared away.
The ADA path now led to downtown office of Voc Rehab after sending off dusty old record from the Sioux City Hospital—Dr. Blume, Fee, et al making another trip—and the Korn neuro report and the Rankin neuro report.
Pramila, who would be case manager, indicated services through Voc Rehab would be forthcoming. She wrote back a few days later that I qualified—I was cheered.
“Your priority in the Order of Selection is Priority Group I. You have a most severe disability,” it said in part. “Vocational Rehabilitation can provide and help pay for the services you need to become employed.”
The Voc Rehab folks and me, like Pramila liked to say with a smile of gratitude to the gods of any and all disabilities, “Have a plan.”
We cut through the hospital and ed evaluation fodder and narrowed it down to organization and prioritizing, my lack therein.
Pramila and I decided that a daily planner would be the thing wherein they’d not only determine the conscious of the king but whereby organization would improve. Well, actually it was this large daily planner, a large clipboard=type arrangement that folded. It was the bells and whistles of a notepad. It was delivered by Craig. Craig, this 1998 January, was, after an extensive search by Pramila, my job coach.
This action, however, did not stop the FI wheels. Frison launched the FI website of gloom and despair. I would most likely have to go on Formal Intervention.
“Honey,” I reported to Kath, “they’re gonna put me back on FI like a couple years ago. I’m not goin’ through with it.”
“Well, do you think you can find somethin’?”
“Oh yeah, Pramila’s gonna have a gal go on an employment search for me. She’ll be able to help me make contacts.”
“Okay. If you think so.”
“I’m just gonna write a letter to Larry Heck. I’ll resign if I don’t have to go through FI again.”
I thought I’d finished with the horrors of someone coming to my classroom on an almost daily basis and writing writing writing. Sitting off in some corner. In the narrow storage room, their presence, unlike the previous school, would be difficult to ignore. Their size wouldn’t let my eyes or my ears ignore them, almost Lilliputian.
In the classroom, I always evinced the professional. So while I’m just this side of puttin’ on my rod belt and tellin’ the whole works to fuck off, go work iron, I just calmly wait my turn, my time, take things as they come.
Well, take that back. I did go to the hall. Bill Beadie, the new BA, sat down with me in the room. “Are you sure you want to work iron,” he said in mid-October. “It was pretty muddy out there today.”
Nor was I havin’ that good of luck with the job coaches either. I felt foolish having people come in after school or in the middle of class and sit down. The room was not well-designed to have three adults traipsing about.

The para and me and the job coach. Surely, Mary Benson knew something was up. And, I thought, Why was J Coach Craig annoying me so? His compatriot, J Coach Cindy, whom Craig had married over the Christmas break, I wanted to hurl through the window.
With a snap of her fingers, she wanted me to clean up, wanted to see my grade book, my lesson plans. Frison already was getting a daily feed.
While she’d never finished college, Voc Rehab’s raison d’ etre—her being J Coach and all—was that Cindy’s mother had been a teacher. Like Craig, she was usually pretty late from the time she said she’d get to the school from the time she actually did.
J Coach Cindy would arrive breathless, catching both her breath and me exiting.
“I’m so glad I caught you.” She’d heave her purse down on the nearest desk. After a few more perfunctories, she asked, “Can I see your grade book?”
She smoked so she coughed between comments.
The demands erupted like a small volcano.
“What’s this check mark mean, how am I ‘supposed to know what that means, where do you have it written down?”
“It just means that it’s a short assignment I just glanced over.”
“Yeah, but what does it mean?”
I had trouble keeping my composure.
“Check just means average. Check plus is above average. Check minus is below average.”
“Do you have that explained anywhere? Like, if I was a substitute, just coming in, I’d know what that means?”
I shrugged my shoulders. She was comin’ down with the load.
“No, not really. But I don’t want them grading my papers.”
“Well,” she said, “you have to have that written down somewhere.”
J Coach Cindy had short hair, cropped short. It stuck to her head and was a light brown. She usually kept her brown coat on and opened over her square shoulders.
“If I was a sub, how could I enter grades in here? Do you have that explained anywhere?” Able to rifle through what I considered to be carefully woven plans with speed and alacrity, Cindy’s eyes would widen. She would turn her head to cough.
“Excuse me,” she’d say. And then she’d cough.
Like others in the past, it was getting difficult for me to muster the ability to answer.
I was able to handle J Coach Craig a little better.
“You were confused that one day I called,” Craig said, looking slightly down at me. He was propped against my desk, his 60’s hairstyle yet to the nape of his neck, bangs to the tip of his glasses. I began to count the braces when he opened his mouth and wondered who had more.
He’d called a few days before. There were so many things I was dealing with at the time. In fact, it was almost when kids were ready to be dismissed with a hundred other things—real and imagined—I have to do.
“Confused, I wasn’t confused.” I didn’t trust him. He has a slickness, had trouble striking the right pose with me. I think he wonders, Just how severe of a case do I have in front of me?
My toiletry, the grooming this time around, they seem to be ok. An ex-teacher, I was relegated to Craig’s classroom tales from the past, tales from the crypt of all curriculum vitas.
“No, no, I didn’t mean it like that,” Craig said, smiling, his voice like it was covered with molasses. Like Cindy, he’s also a puffer. I was so disgusted about every inch of the proceedings I didn’t note the type of brand and/or was it the same brand as wife-to-be. “I meant you were prob’ly pretty busy.”

“See,” I didn’t feel like letting him off the hook just yet, “I was just getting the kids out the door, we were going over our points and had to get ready to escort them to the van. And you called.”
The room was quiet and swept. All the chairs were in order. We’d survived another day.
“Yeah, sure,” Craig said, looking around the room, laughed and smiled, adjusting his glasses, moving straight brown hair bangs out of his eyes, waving his hand like a wand, “l know all about it.”
So anyway he drops the large planner off to help me keep track. It’s the latest dose.
“I thought maybe it would be gift wrapped.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Craig, said, laughing, “it should have been.
“I wrote some things in there,” Craig continued, “that I want you to look at and do for me.”
“Uh, hum.”
Like before, I really didn’t like being told what to do. I know I was making it difficult for Craig to read me, to help me, but I couldn’t help it. Just a few years ago I’d been a school principal. Just two years ago he’d marched to Rome after months of campaigning against FI.
Alarums sounded. I hung on by the skin of my teeth. It was hard to be enthusiastic.
Like a recycled farmer, Craig was now a recycled teacher. Like his view of the me, it wasn’t hard for him not to be a little sorry for the personage before them: a little amused, a little bored, many rungs beneath the first tier. Both of us were doomed in that, now in the late summer of our lives, no one really took us serious.
And as with Cindy, former job coach before I’d complained to Pramila that I cared not for her gruff attitude, it was v. hard for me to follow their instructions. Because they were betrothed, they would take turns working with me. If Cindy couldn’t, Craig could. If Craig, couldn’t, Cindy could. That’s the neat way they had it planned out.

And this was all well and good. It was something that sounded like a good idea. And I didn’t start getting defensive until I realized that in the clearing up of the grade book they were contradicting one another. Cindy had said, when I began putting grades in according to Craig’s suggestions, “What’s this? I thought we weren’t going to do that,” she said. I felt my temper flash up but I declined to say that that was what Craig had suggested I do and I thought Okay, that’ll work. Obviously, C and C didn’t keep track of what particular thing they’d worked on with me so as not to repeat or contradict.
I just was more or less inclined not to have her step into my classroom ever again.
“Oh, yeah.” Craig was pretty close to reaching that point. After all, hadn’t I resigned anyway? Had I not agreed to write a letter of resignation if TAC call off the FI hounds?
The note pad was quite elaborate. In front is a place for cards to keep in there and sure enough I see—and here we have another this year married couple—Cynthia and Craig’s business card. Immediately, like the bandages around my head at the hospital, I tore it up and threw it away.
“The nurses’ just couldn’t keep bandages around your head,” Mom said, recounting semi-conscious actions. “They quit putting them on your head because you’d just tear them off.”
Now Cindy, he thought, she’s a horse of a completely different color. I mean, she married Craig, right? She’s heavy set; she smokes. Craig is kind of hippy type guy. He called from the store a couple times. ‘Won’t be able to make it by today. How’s everything going? Everything all right? Good.’
Sure that was fine. I don’t need any more of the hassle.
In fact, it’s he and Cindy’s store.
“Bein’ the jerk, Kath, that I don’t ask what kind of store it is.”
“Please don’t talk about it. I’m getting a migraine.”
But I couldn’t stop talking about it. “Cindy says ‘I’m on your case because I want to get you ready.’ I saw her and Craig talkin’ to Frison. I don’t mind Craig so much but here’s Cindy comin’ into my classroom tellin’ me how to run things. She doesn’t even have a degree, for Chrissakes. Her mother was a teacher.”
“You told me this, didn’t you?”
“No, not her throwin’ everything away. ‘What’s this for? You don’t need this.’ We brought a huge garbage barrel from the plan area and started dumpin’ stuff in it. ‘What’s this for, are you gonna use it to teach? You don’t need it, throw it out.’”
“Yeah, maybe she wanted to help you get more organized.”
“I know. But I wanted to throw her through the window.”
“Well, they’re just tryin’ to help.”
“Yeah, I know I’m difficult to work with. But didn’t I already resign?”
“Yeah. I don’t know if that was really a good thing.”
“I just couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t go through FI again. It would’ve sent me over the edge.”
I hadn’t told Kath that after the meeting with Frison after the IEP meeting in which she wanted all the assignments I’d given Tony and all the grades. They had to match exactly, Frison said. It was then I then drove to hall and applied for Local 21 Ironworker Apprenticeship.
“I want to get in the apprentice program,” I told Bill Beadie.
“You sure you wanna do that? It’s pretty muddy out there today.”
Beadie looked me straight in the eye. Are you with us? Are you gonna throw your hat in the ring with us and join the union?
“It’s a four-year apprentice program,” Bill added. “Shit, you’ll be able to retire by the time you get done.”
“Yeah, I ‘spose.”
We pretty much decided against it.
“Don’t let them kids push you around,” Bill said as he walked out of the hall.
“Oh, I won’t.” It usually wasn’t the kids he had the most problem with.
Craig had also laid a condition at me. “I’m gonna follow you to your next job.”
“Oh, yeah?”
The only reason I hadn’t fired Craig yet was because I thought somewhere along the line, an understanding, that if the formal intervention didn’t go hat one of the conditions Voc Rehab would continue to guide my sail. In other words, I thought Voc Rehab would line me out to another job.
Craig says he’ll follow me to the next job. He’ll be my ironworker pusher—line things out, set things up, set up the template. He’ll set up and tie the template so I can fly through it.
We’d hear the rooster on Friday.
No, don’t think so. He can’t punk the rebar. Can’t tie. Craig got run off the job.
So I call the hall to keep that iron in the fire.
“I got a week off for spring break.”
“Yeah, you do? Well, come by and we’ll see if we can getcha out.”
Because I’d officially resigned, I didn’t see what difference it made.
More of my breath was taken away when Frison told me new news on Thursday.
“I’m gonna close out your morning T.R.E.E. (teaching respect and encouraging excellence) group.”
She read my startled eyes. It was my dose of reality with 17 non-BD students who came in the morning for home room. “To give you more time to plan.”
My environment was becoming increasingly less restrictive.
“You haven’t found a job yet?” was her query.
“No.” I failed to fully explain to 17 T.R.E.E students I’d had for almost two years why suddenly they couldn’t come to my classroom, having to report to other teachers’ homeroom.
I don’t mind being helped but now it was getting ridiculous.
Like to close down the TREE, the reasoning was suspect. A parent had complained that her daughter didn’t get her yearbook picture, that I’d failed to get it in in time. So now there goes my baby with the bath water.