Hey, We Started a School!

It was 3:00pm on June 20th, the last day of school. The inaugural staff of SLA@Beeber sat around the huge conference table in the main office going over highlights and areas for growth for next year. We picked apart processes, events, successes, failures and made suggestions for next year. We discussed our capacity as a staff, the way our kids had grown so much since September, the way we stuck together as a staff and made some really hard decisions together. We expressed our gratitude for each other’s professionalism and integrity. We also pointed out where things went really wrong and places where we came up short, acknowledging our errors and making plans for addressing them.

Then, our principal (he would kick me for calling him that), stopped us and reminded us of something we had failed to mention for the last 30-45 minutes. “We started a school, guys,” he said. We smiled. In all of the day’s conversations about pedagogy, technology integration, processes and procedures, organizational capacity and more, it was easy to forget the simplest fact: We started a school this year.

Not only did we start a school, but we finished out a fairly successful school year in some challenging conditions. We had 9 full time staff members, including our secretary, principal and program coordinator for 125 students. We had a part time NTA for the morning, but no one at lunch to monitor students (no school police officer or lunch time support staff). We had a nurse once every 3 weeks, a counselor once a week, a part time Special Education teacher and a school psychologist once a month. Add to that the fact that two or three days before school started, we didn’t have enough chairs for all of our students, we had no furniture in the main office, only a handful of cafeteria tables for 125 students, and pretty much no school supplies whatsoever. After picking apart every little nuance of the school year and reflecting on our successes and our failures, we failed to remember that, in the end, we came together and built a school. This year was, by no means, perfect, and we have a lot of space to grow, but I am thrilled to have been a part of the team that started SLA Beeber, and I am even more thrilled to see it expand next year and watch our 9th graders advance to 10th grade and to welcome our new, incoming freshmen and our new staff members, my new colleagues on this journey.

I have never had a more rewarding, frustrating, demanding, celebratory year of teaching in my 10 years of teaching in Philadelphia. Thanks, Chris, Marina, Luke, Dave, Leroy, Max, Karthik and Matt as well as Jeremy, Katie, Tishna and Pat for making this year shine!