We don't have enough______________________!

So the school year is a few weeks in now and we just had one of those big, long English department meetings. You know the kind, where people gripe, complain, moan, go off topic and stray into conversations about how they are the best educational practitioners ever and back in 1981 I was doing this and blah, blah, blah.

Put it this way, if you do not know what type of meeting I am talking about, consider yourself blessed. We have good peeps on our staff and we are all working hard... but put 27 people in a room when there are still a buncha pockets of sheer chaos in different areas of campus and you are gonna hear some stuff.

Essentially, if there was a theme (and I am big on themes -- I make my kids find them, analyze them, write about them and so on), it would be, "We don't have enough."

We don't have enough desks. Due to the budget cuts we lost educators and now there are a bunch of teachers with 43 per class with only 34 desks in the room.

We don't have enough teachers. Some people are carrying more than 200 students on their total roster this year. (And that's a hell of a lot! Too many in fact... no doubt!)

We don't have enough books. Being that about 30% of our kids didn't return the books they checked out last year, and we have no money to order new books, we're short materials.

We don't have enough administrators. Yep, you heard me say it. There just aren't enough hands on deck right now and being that we switched from SASE to ARIES and it's giving major problems to everyone -- and the guy who did the master schedule for the past decade just retired -- my admins just spent last Saturday and Sunday on campus still working out schedules and the such. Admins aren't the enemy... they have it just as tough... but they unfortunately can devolve into number crunching bureaucrats... and there is nothing more problem than number crunching bureaucrats who do not have enough number crunching bureaucrats around them to properly crunch the numbers like good number crunching bureaucrats are often called upon to do.

Essentially, We don't have enough, we don't have enough, we don't have enough!

And so we must make up for it in spirit.