Since most of my friends on Facebook are former students and colleagues from my teaching days in Monrovia, IN, I stay in touch with many of them in my retirement. I still buy from band fundraisers, help out former students who have fallen on tough times, and generally keep up with the news.
When I was still "in the trenches", so to speak, I made it a point to belong to the Indiana State Teachers' Association (ISTA), which is the state branch of the National Education Association (NEA), even when I was married to a school administrator. Those associations are, for teachers, a bargaining union. While never forced to join (and under some pressure from my husband not to), I felt that it was in my best interest to support the group that was negotiating my salary and benefits every year. The annual dues weren't cheap, but nothing of value ever is. And, as it happened, I had need of the association's help one year.
That story goes thusly:
My then-husband took a principalship in Pontiac, IL. We moved there when our child was 18-months-old. I was still on maternity leave during the move. When I was ready to apply for a teaching position in the local school district, I found that I was aced out by an unwritten (and probably illegal) rule that the district would not employ the spouses of administrators. I had to branch out to other communities nearby. One such district was in Saunemin, IL, where a third grade position opened up from a teacher taking a yearlong maternity leave. I got the job. Thereafter, I commuted the few miles east from Pontiac to Saunemin every day. No big deal.
At one point, I had to refer a student to the Principal for a serious classroom incident that required administrative discipline. At the end of the day, I met with the Principal to ask how things went down. He said he had paddled the student. I asked if he had called the parents. He said he had not. I asked if he wanted ME to call the parents. He said no, that children have to learn to stand on their own two feet. (In third grade??) I was shocked. He didn't have any children of his own. I simply believe/believed that it isn't a good practice to discipline a student (especially with corporal punishment) and not inform the parents--but I didn't, because he had told me not to.
The very next morning before school, guess who was knocking on my classroom door? The irate mother of the student, demanding to know why she hadn't been told that her son had been paddled at school! That put me in a tight spot. I didn't want to call the Principal out to her because, well, that isn't good practice, either; yet, I didn't particularly want to take the heat for it. I explained as best I could, without pointing the finger of blame anywhere. Not sure what she did after that.
The next time a student got paddled from my class, I didn't even ask. I just called the parents to let them know. As a result, I got in trouble with the Principal. He said I had gone over his head. He said that HE had to live with these people while I could just escape to Pontiac at the end of the day. He wasn't happy.
At the end of that school year, the teacher I had taken over for resigned to become a stay-at-home mother. I applied for the position but was denied. The Principal said that it was never his intention to hire me for more than just that one year. I said that he had no basis on which to "non-renew" me since he had, not once all year, ever stepped foot in my classroom to observe my teaching, as required by contract. I filed a grievance, so the NEA assigned my case to an association employee to represent me through the whole process.
Understand that this was the school district in a small rural town in the middle of corn country in Illinois. There wasn't an African American within a 50 mile radius. The person that the NEA sent to represent me was a big-city fellow, very well dressed and articulate, and black as black can be! To repeat a cliche', he stuck out like a sore thumb in that area. Nonetheless, I had confidence that I was in good hands. Unfortunately, I failed to understand the clannishness of local school boards in small communities. Although he and I produced a good case, the Board stood behind the Principal, and I lost my case. I could have pursued it further but decided against it because, if they HAD renewed me, I knew I would still be working with that Principal, and it just wasn't worth it. I had stirred things up for that particular principal, however, because he had not fulfilled the responsibilities of his own contract. I moved on.
The year after that, I was on that school district's list for substitute teachers, and (mercifully) only the high school did call a few times for me to sub--which I did. On one of those days, I had been warned about a particularly challenging class and to beware. In the middle of that class, the district Superintendent peered through the window in the classroom door to see how things were going. I was teaching, and the kids were attentive. (Hallelujah!) Later, the Supt. told me, in so many words, that he could see I was a good teacher and expressed regret that I had gotten a raw deal the previous year. It didn't change my reality, but at least I had that vindication. I don't know how long the elementary principal lasted after me.
Now, back to the real purpose of this blog post.
Teachers feed off of each other. We steal each other's ideas and expertise (with permission), and gain support from each other when things get rough. When I joined the Monroe-Gregg School District as a teacher, in the course of my nasty divorce, I was blessed by coming to know a teacher named Phyllis, who became my mentor, of sorts, both as a teacher and a friend. Of all of the people in my life, she is the one who was the most supportive in getting me through some of the darkest days of my life. I love her to pieces! Even though we don't see each other often, we always take up where we left off when we do...and we are always in touch on Facebook. Phyllis has always been a mover-and-shaker politically FOR educators--very active in ISTA. Even though we are both retired now, we still have close ties with friends who are still in the trenches and the community in which we both taught for many years. Those friendships don't just go away.
Okay...so...I was aware that a contingent of our school family was touring Europe for the past couple of weeks. I no longer know any of the students, but three of the teachers on the trip are my friends on Facebook. It was a 39-person group of students, teachers, and parents from Monrovia who are/were touring in Europe when President Trump announced that he was ordering a ban on incoming flights from Europe (due to the corona virus thing), starting yesterday. Unfortunately, he failed to mention that the ban did not include US citizens coming home, and it threw American tourists vacationing in Europe into a panic. And that affected the travel company our group was working with. They were overwhelmed and scrambling. Unfortunately, our group was quickly becoming collateral damage, with everything coming to a roaring halt.
The situation was complicated. The group was in Krakow, Poland, expecting to go to Budapest, Hungary, to then catch a flight to Frankfurt, Germany, for their scheduled flight home to Chicago O'Hare on Sunday (yesterday). Then Hungary closed its borders, so that trip was shut down. The travel company that the group was working with (Explorica) was supposed to provide flight tickets out of Krakow to get the group to Frankfurt, but that wasn't happening, either. The clock was running out. Countries were closing borders. International travel was getting difficult, and even the US was shutting down. Suffice it to say that 20 students (age 12-18), and 19 adults from Monrovia, IN, were stranded in Krakow, Poland, unable to get transportation out of there, as promised by the travel company, in order to catch their scheduled flight out of Frankfurt, Germany, to Chicago O'Hare.
This, my friends, is a teacher's nightmare! These tours are not school sponsored, but travel companies send info to teachers. If a teacher agrees to escort a group, he/she gives the info to interested students/parents, and the plans are made. Of course, no one expects the COVID Apocalypse when making payments for the tours, nor do they expect international borders to be closed while they are on tour. We (speaking of the teachers as if I were one of them, which I once was) are responsible for the kids, no matter what. Teachers have died protecting their students. My heart went out to the folks on this trip. I do so remember being a 10-year-old, living in Japan in 1957-58 with our USNR Officer dad, worrying about what we would do if there were some sort of political uprising making it hard for us to get home.
So, without a flight out of Krakow to Budapest, the group had to start making other arrangements, and Explorica was dragging its corporate feet, while the clock was ticking. I got a FB message from Phyllis that our friends needed help. The group had posted phone numbers of politicians to call, everyone from State Representatives to US Senators, and the US Vice President, in order to get diplomatic pressure to bear on their behalf. They had to be in Frankfurt by Saturday evening in order to catch their flight to the US on Sunday morning. But how to get there? It's 12 hours from Krakow to Frankfurt, overland...and no buses or drivers to be found. Things were getting critical.
One of the teachers on the tour had posted details--INCLUDING PHONE NUMBERS FOR POLITICIANS--for us to call, hoping for diplomatic pressure to blast the travel company off Square One to get them out of where they were. I didn't know it at the time, but that info also went out to many others. Phyllis and I were calling, nonstop, and I guess others were, too. (Between the two of us, we only reached ONE human person. The rest were answering machines, and Vice President Pence's number only produced busy signals all day. But that's another post.) The only actual human being that I personally was able to contact, was an assistant at Rep. Baird's office who said they were already on it, working with the State Department and the American Embassies in Germany and Poland to get our folks home. I'm pretty sure he got weary of hearing from the whole lot of us!
A bus somehow was provided. It was thought that they'd have to de-bus at the German border to change from a Polish driver to a German one...but then Germany decided to let them in, and the driver agreed to drive all the way to Frankfurt. (I'm pretty sure some big bucks changed hands.) That saved our crew from having to wait at a train station for further transportation to Frankfurt. And then we got the word, "We are in Germany!" They would then have to get to Frankfurt, find accommodations for 39 overnight, catch their Lufthansa flight to Chicago the next morning, get through Customs and virus screenings at O'Hare, and hope that the bus to take take them from Chicago to Monrovia High School in Indiana would still be waiting for them.
This whole thing became personal to me. I identified with the parents and teachers who were trying desperately to get home in spite of critical obstacles (the whole COVID-19 thing). I held my breath every step of the way, as things--little by little--unfolded. I was on that trip in spirit, even if not in body. I wanted them all HOME as surely as if I were the one responsible for it. I respected the dickens out of the people in charge--the professionalism, the activism, the knowing-what-strings-to-pull guts, and providing all of that information to those of us at home so we didn't even have to look up names or phone numbers for politicians to beg for intercession. There is no one particular hero in all of this, but many. I think most of the tour was wonderful for these folks. Just the last few days got frantic as countries closed borders and things got critical. It took the State Department, American Embassies in two countries, the ISTA, and a whole lot of prayers to get these people home, but it happened!
It occurred to me that Monrovia often had police escorts for victorious teams to come home from competitions. I wanted this crew to know the value of HOME, so I reached out to another former student who is in Law Enforcement in Mooresville, IN, (a neighboring city). His name is Brian. I wanted the bus to have a police escort into Monrovia, but didn't have a clue how to make that happen. Brian did. With so many variables in the whole situation, I thought it was iffy to even ask...but I shouldn't have doubted. The Monrovia Town Marshal intercepted the bus at the Plainfield exit on I-70, and escorted them the rest of the way to Monrovia. (I'd had to alert one of the teachers on the bus what was going to happen because I was asking so many nosy questions. The rest didn't know.)
What a glorious ending to a long strange trip! Guess the kids on the bus thought the CDC was after them. I'm just happy that I could contribute a little bit to let them know how happy we ALL were that they were HOME. So many thanks needed for so many people in the interest of a few folk from a tiny town in Central Indiana. We are all in this together.
We are so blessed!
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