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Today is President's Day, so it is an unofficial beginning. However, as always happens when I check my school mail on the weekend, my mind is mindful of the upcoming week. Most importantly, my principal e-mailed out the 2010-2011 school year budget allocations she had received via e-mail from the district. I was very surprised to see the projected enrollment is up from this year, with our bumper crop of kindergarteners* this year moving up to first grade, making room for yet another bumper crop of kindergarteners*.
I was the proud recipient of the duty of "Prep Schedule Creator" at the beginning of the year, totally by default (and let me tell you, that in itself could be the inspiration of many darkly-colored PG-13 blog posts) so immediately after my being pleasantly surprised about the up in allocations is the realization that we may need more specialist allocation (as it is, we're almost all 0.8 FTE), and I know that within a few days I'll be asked to start rough-drafting what the schedule will look like for next year. Yeesh, I wonder if I can push that off until April.
*Confused as to the proper spelling of multiple kindergarten students, as seen in the above blog. Spell check suggested either kindergartners or kindergardeners. I may have to resort to "kindergarten students" but that is just so long.
One of the benefits of creating the prep schedule is being able to schedule the students to fit your needs as a specialist. For instance, I used to schedule my students so that they went from youngest to oldest and thus there was a progression of age throughout the day rather than a hodgepodge, back and forth "who am I teaching now?" kind of order. Also, it allowed me to put my heaviest days on Mondays and Fridays (the most frequent days off). Hey, we specialists need breaks, too!
ReplyDeleteGood tips! I'll definitely be wiser when I work on next year's schedule. Which I'm already trying to organize (and I do NOT have the time to add that to my pile right now, but my brain won't listen to me).
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