The school year that just wouldn't end

I am hundreds of miles away from school as I write this, and skipping town the day after graduation was a most excellent idea. It was a long and difficult year for a variety of reasons: the retirement of our long-time principal, the palpable anxiety amongst the faculty as the new principal (a former faculty member, too) started making changes, and the continuing stress of not having instructional support funds, which include library allocations. I also started poking aroud, considering jobs I didn't really want, just from some sense that a decade is rather long to have been in one position, especially when there is little opportunity for advancement within the district.

Nonetheless, we survived the staffing analysis with out faculty units intact, which is better than many high schools fared. But now we have a positively hellish calendar to look forward to next year, without any real breaks except one week at the holidays and another for spring break.

I gave away hundreds of books and ARCs the last week of school. Many of the books were donations from a book sale fundraiser which left me with thousands of cast-offs that I'd hung onto just in case the community library got underway, but I was tired of waiting on that project which no one wanted to spearhead. (I DO already have one library to run.) So I decided to let the kids at them, so they would have as much to read as possible over this longer-than-usual summer break.

I will be going to School Library Journal's Day of Dialog tomorrow and then will have Tuesday to myself before heading home for some stressful meetings Wednesday. New York was an excellent choice for these days away, not only because of the opportunity to meet up with friends I haven't seen in eons, and not just because cities always makes me so happy to be back at home afterwards, but particularly because my husband is so terrorized by the thought of bedbugs we haven't been since 2009. He was especially anxious when I told him how close to Times Square I was staying...fingers crossed he doesn't force me to incinerate my luggage upon returning home.