School Renewal Plan: Fill & Download for Free

Honestly?A high school kid could come up with a better plan.I’ll give you one, just off the top of my head: an expanded guest-worker program, renewable every 1–2 years.People would come out of the shadows.Their employers wouldn’t be able to exploit them.They could return to their country whenever they wanted.More of them would bring taxes into the system.It really is a no-brainer, but Trump wasn’t able to come up with something like this… so maybe it does require a bit of a brain.

I used to work for a small English training school in Hebei province, China. I wasn’t fired, but I learned while visiting my family in the US that my boss was intending to discontinue my contract after I returned. This was problematic, not only because I would be out of a job, but because, as an English teacher in China, I have a work visa and resident permit that would expire if my job contract wasn’t renewed or replaced. Also, I would only have one month left on my contract after returning from vacation, so I strongly suspected that my boss was hoping to use that desperation as leverage against me. If I just quit outright and didn’t return for the remaining one month on my contract, that could disqualify me from legally accepting other jobs in China in the future.Thankfully, my boss had started complaining about me to my coworkers after I left, and one of them contacted me about our boss’s plan. Since I still had two weeks of vacation left with my family in the US, I immediately went online and started looking for similar jobs in other English schools across China.Luckily, I have a Master of Science in Teaching degree from an accredited university, I’m a native English speaker with American citizenship, and I speak much better Chinese than most foreigners, so I’m significantly more qualified than most of the applicants that these institutions usually see. Despite my circumstances, I think I only contacted two schools, but both of them quickly replied asking to schedule a video interview.By the time I returned to China, I already had offers from both of my top two choices. The first one in Zhejiang province was offering more than double the salary of the Hebei school. The second one in Henan province was offering the same salary as the Hebei school, but with better benefits and a “full time” schedule of only 18 hours per week, which would give me plenty of free time to more fully invest in and enjoy my life in China.After my return, I met with my boss and, exactly as expected, she told me that even though she knew I was the most qualified teacher in the school, she didn’t think I was a good teacher and that I didn’t work hard enough on my lesson plans. She also complained that more than 30 of my students had quit the school and that they couldn’t afford to keep paying me, especially since all that lost tuition was my fault. But, she would be willing to give me a second chance if I promised to work a lot harder. It was an obvious lie. I only had about 100 students total, so it would have been impossible for 30 of them to disappear without me noticing. In fact, some of my classes had even grown!She also told me that the substitute for my classes was a much better teacher than me even though he didn’t have an advanced degree and wasn’t a native English speaker.Another complaint was that I frequently went traveling, which inconvenienced the school since they had to reschedule my classes or pay a substitute to cover for me. This was another easily disprovable falsehood, since I had only traveled twice; once to visit a friend’s wedding (which the school audaciously asked me to reschedule so it wouldn’t interfere with classes) and once to visit my family in my home country before renewing my contract. This was over an 18 month period, so hardly qualified as “frequent.”I inquired with the Chinese teachers who told me that about 30 students had in fact, left the school, but very few of them were my own. Crucially, most of the students left after the boss had decided to buy a building out in the countryside and move weekend classes there; a decision that the parents were very outspokenly against.As for the substitute teacher, the boss had completely overstated his accomplishments. My Chinese co-teacher for the class explained to me that the boss thought he was an amazing teacher because some of the parents mentioned that their students learned the days of the week after only one class. AMAZING! In reality, I had already taught those students the days of the week months ago, so he was only reviewing what they had already learned from me.After I told my boss that I had accepted another job, she replied that she thought I was irresponsible for taking the easy way out instead of working harder and committing myself to my job and my students.THEN THE MAGIC HAPPENED!I developed an ear infection just about two weeks before I was scheduled to leave. Everything sounded like I was under water, which is a big deal for a language teacher, but the boss was the only person at the school who had the time to take me to the ear doctor. By a wonderful coincidence, the ear doctor recognized my name, “Matthew.” His son was one of my students, and he told my boss that his son loved my classes and talked about me a lot at home.The boss was shocked to hear about what an impact I had had on the doctor’s son and began begging me to reconsider. She became extremely emotional and asked me to “think about the students.” I told her that there were even more students at the other school.BUT IT STILL GOT BETTER.After the other parents learned that my contract was going to expire, all the online group chats for my classes filled up with parents commenting that their children will miss me and don’t want me to leave.Then one day, during my last week at the school, I had just finished a class with my largest and youngest class. The Chinese teacher explained to the students that I was “going home” so we could all take a picture together before I left. This classroom also happened to be on the first floor, closest to the reception desk. The mothers there to pick up their children formed a mob in the lobby and began arguing with the receptionist, demanding that the school let me stay. One of the mothers who could speak English came into the classroom and tried to explain to me that I could renew my contract and stay in China longer. I didn’t have to leave! The mothers hung around the lobby, going back and forth between the classroom and the receptionist trying to convince me and the school that I didn’t have to leave.ICING ON THE CAKE.After I moved to Henan province (where I would only work 18 hours per week), I remained in contact with my old coworkers, all of whom continued to update me on the gradual deterioration of the school and overall loss of morale among the remaining teachers. Two of my former coworkers (who are now married) even joined me in my new job at the Henan school where, more than two years later, we are still working fewer hours and now earning almost twice as much as we did at our old school.As if that weren’t amazing enough, my current school also allows us to take three vacation days per month, which means that now I actually DO travel frequently.To top it all off, my current foreign teacher coworkers and I are all going on a beach vacation to Sanya (Chinese “Hawaii”) next week, and our amazing school is paying for it. Life is good ^_^

A noted Bankruptcy scholar at Michigan Law School has said the following on the Detroit bankruptcy:Bankruptcy law can do a lot, like help recover a fundamentally sound business enterprise that has been overburdened by debt. But it cannot design cars that people want to drive or make residents want to live and pay taxes in a city. The true challenge for Detroit is not whether it will confirm a chapter 9 plan of adjustment, or not even whether it can stick to the new financial regime that plan proposes. It is whether the city leaders, who will remain long after Kevyn Orr has left, can design a vibrant urban renewal plan, undistracted by the travails of financial default. Bankruptcy can help them escape that distraction, but it cannot deposit creativity into brains.Detroit has emerged out of bankruptcy a new city, financially speaking. Huge swaths of dollars from the annual budget that were going debt service are now going to police, fire, lighting, blight removal, and other critical services that make a city livable. But Detroit has a new skeleton, but not a new heart. At least not yet.It is now up to young people graduating from the prestigious public and private colleges across the state to take jobs in Detroit and contribute to the positive change now beginning to occur within the city. It is up to those who have called Detroit a home the past decades to continue to make a positive difference in their communities. It is up to those who fled from the city limits in decades past to vote on regional transit, and help contribute to the growth of the city economically. Only when the people of the region as a whole come together will Detroit come roaring back to the preeminence it once enjoyed.