Drama At Work

I have found a new assistant to replace Annie just in time for the beginning of the school year. Kathy is in her 50's and she has been teaching head start for about 15 years. Hopefully she will work out well.

I went into work yesterday to clean my fish tank. I have a hose that I hook up to an outside faucet and it has a little attachment that allows it to drain water out of the tank on one setting then fill it by turning the attachment to another setting. I got it all hooked up and set to drain the tank and I turned on the water but the part that connects to the faucet was cracked and water started spraying everywhere. I tried to turn the water off and the handle on the faucet broke off in my hand. I went to get a custodian to figure out how to turn the water off and at some point while he was fiddling with the faucet he must have bumped the attachment into the fill position, and the next thing I new my aquarium had overflowed and flooded my room. It took about an hour to clean up the mess!

The other bit of drama that has been going on started on Thursday. By way of background information, I had a little girl whom I will call Tammy in my day care last year. Tammy's mother was not married when she was born, and Tammy spent almost all of her 1st 2 years in her maternal grandmother's custody. Sometime around the time that Tammy turned 2 her mother married and Tammy went to live with her mom and her new stepfather. Tammy's grandmother is a teacher and she is the one who signed her up for our program. The first time I met her she told me that, "My daughter and her husband are, well, let's just say that they're both a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic." I found that assessment to be true. They were not the brightest and they were both really weird. Tammy was basically a feral child. She was almost three but not potty trained, wouldn't let anyone touch her, and her behavior was completely out of control. We worked with her but it didn't seem to make much of a difference. Sometime in November or December, Tammy's stepfather adopted her. About two weeks later the mother told him, "She's your problem now." And she left. As things got weirder the maternal grandmother and the adoptive father feared that the mother might do something to harm Tammy, and I was instructed to call them immediately if she ever came by the school. She never did come by, and she only had 3 or 4 supervised visits with Tammy between January and June. Apparently sometime in the last few weeks Tammy's adoptive father went off to boot camp and her mother decided that she was ready to be a mother again. On Thursday of this week I got an e-mail from the grandmother stating, "I'm sorry to inform you that Tammy will not be returning to Davis High this year. I'm wondering if DCFS has contacted you about Tammy being molested while in your care?" Needless to say I was floored. Even if someone in my program wanted to do something like that, we are basically in one big room and there would not be an area private enough to do something like that. After a few more e-mails back and forth the grandmother admitted that she didn't think that anything like that could have happened in our facility, but her daughter did. Remember, this is the woman who left her daughter, only had a few supervised visits with the child over the next 8 months, and who never set foot in our school after December of last year. Luckily I haven't been contacted by DCFS or anyone else about these allegations, which my principal and I assume means that either the woman never really reported a claim, or the claim was not credible enough for them to follow up on. Keep your fingers crossed for me that nothing further comes from this! If this is any indication about the way that things are going to go this year, I don't want to go back to work.

I NEED a Bahamavention!!!