HOT HOT HOT

My classroom, or as I affectionately call it, my "pizza oven" (because it's unventilated and made of cinderblock and it's very small because it's really just a closet), is beginning to get seriously warm. This old school building has no AC, of course. But I could live without AC if we could just get some more classroom space at this school. It's a huge problem and it's forcing us to cram kids and teachers into places that should never have been a classroom. Even if we could just get three or four more mobiles to put outside, that would ease a lot of the space problem... but it doesn't look like North HS will get much, if anything.

A few years back, the school board lobbied and won a one-cent sales tax hike in the Des Moines metro area to fund refurbishment of the crumbling infrastructure of a large number of DM schools. Quite a few elementary schools have gotten a good facelift that was badly needed. One of the high schools got a major workover. Now it looks like there won't be enough $$ left to help our ancient building get some much-needed updates. The one-cent sales tax is going to expire... and since they built the new mall out in the suburbs and not within the DM city limits, we are getting ZERO of the sales tax that's rolling in from those businesses. The school board isn't collecting as much as they had predicted.

Typical, of course.

But nonetheless this school needs SPACE. NOW. And there isn't any more. I'm already losing this classroom to another teacher next year, and I'll have to move in with another SPED teacher, in another really small space that was carved from a larger room with cubicle partitions.

Obviously I'll work with whatever they give me, because I like it here and I want to stay. But if I could wave a wand and make the $$ appear to actually fix this place up and bring it into the 21st century, I would.