About a year ago, I posted the picture below of some beat-up books from the social-science department. The set of books seen in that picture, as well as the rest of the books that went with the class set or were checked out to students, were about thirteen years old at the time, and have since aged yet one more year, and managed to survive another year of student usage.

For starters, the books shown in the picture were the worst of the bunch; that being said, they were still part of a class set that the teachers needed for the students, and have been part of a class set for a number of years. The rest of the books are in a little more of a usable condition, but that’s beside the point. Also keep in mind that these books are now on their fourteenth year of usage, and that the last adoption for the social-science department was supposed to be the year 2012.

Even though many different sets of site administration, assistant superintendents, superintendents, and board members have walked through classrooms at the site multiple times, there was never any sense of urgency when it came to doing something about the condition of the books that were either part of a class set or assigned to the students, you know, those that administration claim to be putting first.

But after a walkthrough at the beginning of this school year, the upper echelon of administration finally decided to take action and do something about the condition of the books which, unless you’ve peeked ahead, will be revealed to you shortly.

So what is it that made this school year the one where the current administration finally decided to do something about the something that they have seen a number of times already? After all, it’s not like they didn’t see the books whenever they visited the site and walked through the classrooms. The answer, not too surprisingly, has really nothing to do with the students themselves, or the teachers who have been pointing out, year after year, that the books are not only old, but that the majority of them for the entire department are in pretty bad shape.

Though there is no direct proof of what made the top administrators feel the need to make some drastic changes, it more than likely has to do with some active parents that are frequenting board meetings and questioning how the district is spending their money. The parents are also talking to teachers about the daily ins-and-outs of the school their kids are attending; which is one of the few things that will make a typical, revolving-door administrator actually do something, as opposed to just paying lip service whenever someone starts asking questions.

If you are in education, more specifically a teacher, you are fully aware that administration will simply not take action and will look the other way unless someone, usually a group of parents, starts to make some noise about an issue when it comes to what is going on at any of the school sites. They will also take action when something occurs that makes some sort of headline and they need to demonstrate that they are being “proactive” (another eduspeak word that admin will use when they try and make themselves sounds smarter), even though the proactive move will happen after the instance of whatever it is that’s forcing their hand into making changes.

But this year is different; this time, administration took decisive action! Here are the results of their changes:

Yes, this was one of their solution. The books seen above are actually the ones that are in good-enough shape such that they only needed someone to cover over the graffiti with markers. The remaining books that were not thrown out (not seen in the picture) had paper-book covers put on them so as not to be visible for the next time that some parents decide they want to visit classrooms. As long as the books had a cover that was either still attached or, as seen in the second picture above, the covers were still in good enough shape so that a little masking tape (it’s difficult to see, but it’s there) was all that was needed to fix the problem, they were kept in the rotation. Granted, they did throw out the cover-less books that were in as abhorrent of a condition as you saw in the first picture, but I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusion as to how much they think about the students when their solution to fixing the fourteen-year old book issue is to use markers to cover up any vandalism. Think of it this way, the students that first used these books back in 2005, would now be in their early thirties.

The second solution that administration came up with was to cover the books when they are not in use.  In order to keep the books out of the view of visitors to the school, mainly parents, the social science teachers were instructed to put a piece of butcher paper on the bookshelves where the books are to be kept.  I’d elaborate on this, but the picture following picture should sum it up.

Now, you might be thinking that administration is intent on replacing the books, but if they are, the department has heard nothing of it. And if there were an adoption coming up, then the teachers in the department would have been notified, and would be meeting with administration to figure out what books would work best for the department and the students.

There is also the issue of whether or not new, hard-copy books are even needed with so many districts going digital (keep in mind that the last adoption year for the department should have been around 2012, maybe ’13). Even though our district is pushing the one-laptop-for-every-student just as much as every other underperforming school district, there still hasn’t been any meetings or emails sent out to the teachers in the department as to what digital texts would work best with the rolling out of the laptops for the students. In other words, these book will definitely be in use for at least one more year, which means it will be—at the very minimum—the year 2020 before they are replaced with either new or digital copies.

As usual, the people that are in charge of making these decisions are the ones always using the phrase “students first” whenever the opportunity arises. But for those of us who have been in the system long enough, or just someone on the outside looking in, we know that when it comes to your revolving-door administration, the phrase is nothing more than semantic satiation.

“I’ve said jiminy jillikers so many times the words have lost all meaning.” – Millhouse Van Houten (The Simpsons)