Colville School District: Fill & Download for Free

I went to a high school for the arts in the late seventies, so as you might imagine, we practically collected weird people, including a few teachers. As one friend said at the time, nearly everyone was there because we didn’t fit in in our home schools. (This school was and still is a magnet school. It and a few others were created as part of a court ordered desegregation plan, so-called “magnets” because they drew students from all over the district.)Back then I knew people who had crazy, multi-colored hair, kids who were openly gay (NOT common at the time), kids who were stoned pretty much all the time, people who wore nothing but vintage clothes, people who tried really hard to be weird, and many who’d spent their lives up to that point trying really hard not to be. Some of them really let loose when they got to our school.We didn’t have a football team. We had a mime troupe. No marching band; chamber choir. It had a very relaxed atmosphere, especially back in the beginning when it was really small. It was a lot of fun and a great experience for most of us, I’d say. We valued uniqueness, difference, and yep, weirdness.I do remember one guy that even the rest of us thought was weird, and not in a good way. Even at the time I remember thinking that there had to be something wrong with him. He seemed to do well academically, but had - I’m not sure, either a speech impediment or really poor speaking habits that made it very difficult to understand him. He mumbled and spoke very quietly, with occasional louder expressions. He was short and overweight and very hairy, fully bearded at age 15, or so. I think he looked a little like some kind of different, fantasy creature, and from what I knew of him he may have actually liked that description. He was into that sort of thing. He also created comic strips. That weren’t funny. Or especially well-drawn. Or even understandable. Just weird. And in a school that valued weirdness, that was something!I don’t remember people being mean to him, although that may have just been because I wasn’t around him much. Plus, in comparison to how people treated him in junior high (we were from the same general area) maybe I just didn’t notice it in high school. He was not the kind of person who would’ve been ignored in a typical high school setting, but that’s more how I remembered about him in high school, people just kind of avoided him.It may not sound like he was all that weird; besides looking and talking strangely he may have done some really bizarre things, but I never saw it. I always felt kind of sorry for him. Not enough to befriend him, I’m sorry to say; he made me uncomfortable because I couldn’t understand what he was saying and then he’d laugh loudly and I just wasn’t able to deal with it. He also was known to latch onto any girls who were friendly to him and I definitely lacked the maturity to handle that well.I know he went to college after high school and apparently did quite well. I don’t believe he ever married or had children. I heard that he died in 2011 of brain cancer. Seems like a sad life. I hope I’m wrong and that he knew better than I what makes a fulfilling life.

When I was in my late twenties I went through about a year of some very odd things happening. One night in May of that year my car window was broken out and the radio stolen. I lived in a second floor apartment above a garage that faced a side street, behind the main house. The break-in wasn’t that big a deal, insurance paid for it, but it seemed like I was picking up broken glass for days.Right after I had moved into that apartment I had put up some shelves in my tiny little kitchen, which was only separated from the rest of the apartment (which was pretty much just a table, a couple of chairs, and my bed) by a long cabinet with a countertop stuck on top of it. I was really proud of myself for putting up these shelves and lining them with a cute arrangement of my dishes and glassware, including some that were left to me when by my dad who had died several years before. So then two or three weeks after the car break-in I was awoken by a loud crash in the middle of the night. I turned on the lights and realized that my cat had climbed up on the middle of my 3 shelves which could not support her weight. (She was not a petite cat.) I cannot tell you how upset I was about all my pretty things shattering all over the floor. I just went back to bed and cleaned it up the next day. Again, it seemed like I was finding broken glass for a week.About a week after that I was in bed reading before I went to sleep. It was about 11:00 p.m. and I thought I heard a sound outside. I turned out my light and looked out the window, which was right over my mattress and looked out over my car on that same little side street. I couldn’t really tell what it was in the dark, but there was something about waist high, white with something darker on it, leaning up against my car. Since my car had been broken into so recently, and I was a single girl living alone, I was a little afraid of what was going on out there, so I called the police and they sent a couple of officers over to check it out. I went downstairs when they got there and to see what that thing was. It turns out that someone had set a large professionally done black and white photo mounted on foam core board in my driveway. It was a close up picture of a model with her hair up in a fancy do, like posters you used to see in hair salons to show the latest styles. The officers both turned their flashlights on it and the three of us stood there looking at it for a couple of minutes. None of us knew what to say! They were very nice and assured me that it was okay that I’d called; I was feeling kind of foolish for being scared because of what the thing turned out to be. They left, I went back to bed, and the next morning the poster was gone. Never did find out why it was there.That summer I had this weird door thing going on. The door to my little apartment somehow came off its hinges, which were inside! I came home one afternoon and had trouble opening the door and when I finally gave it a hard push, the door nearly came off in my hands. I was able to prop it up while I called my landlord. He couldn’t get it fixed until the next day so I put a piece of furniture in front of it and called my sister to come over and spend the night.When school started that fall my classroom was in an old portable building and on the morning of about the ninth or tenth day of school I went to unlock the door and the doorknob came off in my hand! I got the custodian to come let me in, but he couldn’t replace it — I think we were required to call the district maintenance department to come fix it. It took four maintenance workers a day and a half to replace and paint a new door.There were a couple of other minor door incidents around that same time, but I don’t remember what they were. It was a long time ago.There were some other strange coincidences and weird things that happened that year it this post is already too long, so I’ll write about those another time.

Okay. I cannot NOT answer this question and I apologize in advance for the length of time I’m likely to spend up here on my soapbox. I’ve at least skimmed all the answers given so far and there are many many good thoughts and ideas here. One thing I noticed is that most seemed to address problems in high school, which really can’t be fixed in high school. In fact, I don’t know that many of them can be fixed in middle or even elementary school. My experience in twenty years of teaching elementary school, both public and private, and at the community college level taught me that it is a societal problem that most schools are constantly trying desperately to fix, even though it is sometimes a losing battle.When a child comes to school in pre-k, k, or first grade, they have already spent the first 3, 4, or 5 years of their lives with (sometimes) their parents. It’s generally understood that those first years are developmentally the most important time in our lives. Our character is formed, brain function evolves, and behavioral patterns are set. It is not impossible to change these things after the age of 5 or 6, but it becomes increasingly difficult as we grow older, especially if negative influences that affect that growth don’t change.There are many charts and graphs and models that illustrate how we learn, how our brains mature, etc. but the following one seems especially pertinent to me in this discussion. It demonstrates how the sequential development of our sensory processes, which is closely related to neurological development, has a great effect on our ability to learn. If the first skills/levels are not properly or completely formed, it more difficult for subsequent tasks to be achieved. The inverted pyramid makes clear how handicapped one is when even just a few of the processes are not developed. (Sorry it’s so huge!)Looking at the chart, you can see that Learning/School Success is way up at almost the very top level, which means that all the other items are supposed to be mostly developed prior to school age.So imagine you have a five year old who has had poor nutrition all his life, and has been mostly ignored or set in front of a television, and has had very limited interaction, much less instruction, with adults during that time. Imagine further that that same child has spent little or no time outside playing with others, lives in an atmosphere of unpredictable violence and drug abuse, frequently suffers abuse of various kinds, and seldom has his or her own needs met in a timely, consistent, and sufficient manner. What the hell kind of result do you think you’re going to get?Now imagine a whole classroom full of these kids. Then multiply that number - let’s be conservative and say a classroom has 15 of them - by the number of kindergarten classes in that school, and then that by the number of schools in a city, and that number of cities — well, you get the picture.I have taught in schools with excellent teachers who work their tails off every single day of the week, before school, after school, on their lunch hour (Hah! Sorry, it’s more like 20 minutes.), during their planning period, on their vacation days, plus on mandatory staff development training days, only to be blamed for all the problems their students have, including low test scores and bad behavior, and all of this while being treated poorly by parents, administrators, politicians and the media and don’t even get me started on low pay and spending their own money on necessary classroom supplies.I've seen first graders come into class with syringes, second graders come to class every day of the year in clothes smelling like urine - cat and their own, third graders miss 3 days of school because they couldn’t find their shoes or because their parents had a fight and mom drove off with the car, including the kids’ backpacks and didn’t come back for a week. One year teaching third grade I only had one student pass both the math and reading sections of the standardized test they took that year, and he had already been through third grade once before.Despite all the learning problems, language problems, behavior problems, we kept on plugging away at what they were supposed to be learning. The main problem was that most of them couldn’t do the work. They weren’t prepared well enough to read and comprehend a third grade social studies text book. And the second grade teachers said the same thing about their textbooks and materials. And so on.You try to teach them where they are, but it takes a lot of extra time and then you end up not even close to finishing the book, which, in effect, leaves them behind in the next year’s curriculum, and it never ends. And these are 8 and 9 year olds! They’ve got to have some down time and some play time during the day.So the deficits build. And if you are in a school where there are kids who are well taken care of and who pretty much perform on grade level, they get stuck in the same class with everyone else because everyone learns better with smart people in the class with them. So the kids with lower grades and lower performance on standardized tests don’t have to feel bad about themselves because they’re in “the slow class,” and to heck with the really smart kids who need more stimulation but don’t get it because the teacher is too busy addressing the kid who’s acting out because he can’t do the work because he only reads on a first grade level and this is fifth grade, and another who’s stuck on the directions because he’s only been in the country for about a month and his English is just not good enough yet, and another one across the room is arguing with another because, “Miss, she’s trying to tear out the pages of my book,” and well, again, you see what I mean.I eventually took a job at a private school and was just giddy for the first few weeks because of how lovely everyone was! The administration made sure they didn’t put all the “problem” kids in my room because I was new. The other third grade teacher actually called me to introduce herself a couple of weeks before school started and then when it did she couldn’t have been more helpful. The kids and parents were not perfect, by any means. There were still some really dysfunctional families and kids but the numbers were so much lower that it never became overwhelming. There were some kids who had learning differences (you can’t say learning problems or anything negative anymore) but you can deal with one or two of those and get them the help they need. No syringes, no clothes steeped in cat pee, everybody’s there and wearing shoes because the parents have done their job. They aren’t passed out drunk or too high to stay conscious long enough to sign a permission slip for the field trip that literally every other third grader is going on that day.These kids’ physical, emotional, developmental, educational, and spiritual needs are met. And they have been met from the day they were born and before. These parents were people who had either learned how to be good parents because they were raised by good parents or if they weren’t they went and found out how to do it on their own. I learned in the public schools where I taught that second generation drug addicts make the worst parents not just because they were addicts, but because they didn’t even know what a good parent was. It’s not just a problem of poverty, although that’s certainly a huge part of it. There were dads I knew who worked 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week to support their families and mom worked just as hard at home and those kids were clean, had been taught decent table manners, and had their hair and teeth brushed and their homework done every single day. If the parents who spoke very little English didn’t know how to do something like completing forms or helping with homework, they asked around the neighborhood or the school until they figured it out. They did the very best they could.Nobody wants to say it but it’s more the parents fault than anyone else’s that American schools are often such crappy places. Maybe “free” (meaning spend the money on that instead of on some of the pet-projects they throw money at in high schools) parenting classes should be required before your child reaches school age, as well as universally mandated pre-k. Think about it. If everybody took care of their kids and was involved in their schools to whatever extent they were able, if teachers were treated like professionals and their ideas were listened to and even sometimes implemented, if there were very broad national and state curriculum guidelines but local districts were allowed to address specific needs in their own communities, imagine how much less the politicians and businesspeople, whose only experience with school was that they went to one, would need to be involved.Thanks for reading!”‘