The first day at school was fantastic. I got a clean classroom which is really all I could ask. I have three computers, a color printer, and an enormous television. Seriously. I'm just gonna go hang out at school all the time. We get cable. Cable! In a third grade classroom? Yeah. Maybe I can watch some of the shows I like now. At the rate I'm going, I'm never going to get cable. I'm so broke, criminal charges should be brought against the school district. It's bad. I get paid next week and it's almost all already spent. After that I don't get paid again until the end of September. But that check...man, it's gonna be huge. I get half of my signing bonus plus $250 for supplies. It's neat that we get that supply money a month into the school year...
...That's the cool thing about school board decisions. They make no sense. It's almost like some kind of sick comical game that these disgustingly rich and wealthy, overwhelmingly white people play with the education system here. I spent several hours last Wednesday at a school board meeting. Generally, I really enjoy wasting my time, because it's fun. Sometimes I sit in staff meetings or training classes, and while it's boring, it's kind of fun because I figure out some way to occupy my mind, pass notes to my friends, or, on the rare occasion that the information being imparted is actually worthwhile, I learn something. This school board meeting, though, my God. It was so bad I couldn't even fantasize about being somewhere else. I think that they do all that parliamentary procedure crap to make it so boring and droll that no one will show up, so they can make decisions and when people get mad, they can say "well, you should have come to the board meetings!" It also helps that they schedule them when most parents are at work, meaning that only a precious few housewives [who probably can't come because they have other little kids at home to take care of] and people who happen to be off work in the middle of the afternoon will be able to come.
The saddest part was when the few parents and teachers who were there stood to speak, and it was just painfully obvious that the school board members and the superintendent didn't care at all what was being said. It made me furious.
Oh, I learned something else fantastic today. Former president Ronald Reagan, back when I was a little kid, signed a bill known as the "Double Dipper" into law. The basics of this are that if a person [say, ME] works for long enough in the for-profit sector to earn Social Security benefits upon retirement but also worked long enough in the non-profit sector [the vast majority of non-profit workers are public school employees] to earn benefits from a system such as TRS [Teacher Retirement System], their Social Security benefits are reduced by sixty percent.
You have got to be kidding me. If I earn my Social Security, I deserve to get those benefits upon retirement. If some other girl and I both started working at the same time, and paid into SS long enough to get our full retirement benefits, then we both quit working for the rest of our lives, and then started drawing our SS at the designated age [67 for me], we'd both get full benefits. But if she quit working and I started contributing to a system like TRS, a system that is totally separate from SS and in no way affects SS's fund pool, if I draw TRS benefits upon retirement, I'd lose sixty percent of my SS benefits. It just makes no sense at all. None. If you put more into your retirement fund, you should get more when you retire. The end.
Anyway, this archaic, stupid law has been slashed from the books in all but 14 states, one of which is, of course, Texas. We've been instructed to add to the mountain of more than 250,000 pieces of mail that's already been sent to Texas legislators asking them to pass bills SB1523 and HR2638 which would eliminate this problem.
Man, this job had better be as rewarding as everyone says it is, because it's seriously stressing me out already. And school hasn't even started yet.
