Sad Day for Alsup

We had a sad day at work today. We've been lucky enough to be blessed with an amazing principal for the last 6 years. She's everything a true leader should be: encouraging, compassionate, reasonable, stern, not afraid to get her hands dirty, hilarious, personable and wonderful.

She will do anything for you if she thinks it will make you a better teacher: and therefore help out the kiddos. She is a fantastic mixture of being knowledgeable and professional...but yet extremely approachable. She knows all the names of our kids. She knows I have 2 cats. She knows Kevin's job and she's met some members of my family and remembers their names. In 6 years, I've never been turned away when I showed up at her door to talk. She encourages you to do better because she herself is so amazing and you would rather walk on nails then let her down.

One of my favorite Lynn-moments was a few years ago when we didn't have air conditioning and we were in the 85 degree classrooms in August getting set up. I was super sweaty and hot and dusty and gross and I thought I heard the ice-cream man. (click on that link and you can hear the song for yourself...be prepared. It tends to get stuck in your head!) I thought that was odd because we never get the ice-cream man in Commerce City. The music kept getting louder and louder so I went to my outside door to look out...nothing. Just the playground. Funny, I thought. Then I looked up and Lynn was wheeling her laptop into the room: it was playing the ice-cream man song! Under it, she had a bunch of choices of ice-cream for the staff to have. Just a little treat to help you through the day, she said, laughing. I got to pick my ice-cream and she wheeled away to the next teacher with the ice-cream song playing. It was awesome.

So, we had a sad day today. Lynn has decided to apply for a very prominent position in the district. It's an amazing opportunity for her and we're really not surprised: someone with her talents wasn't going to last at Alsup for very long. We all walked around today with sad, but resigned faces. We knew it was too good to last. We had an amazing leader who got our little school up to over 90% proficient in the CSAP tests (the other schools in our district are around 30%-60%) and now she's going to be gone. She's been gone since Feb anyway helping out at another school, but now she's officially gone.

I have to make some decisions now. I've always said that the main reason I love my job is because I have such an amazing principal. That's gone now. We'll see what I decide to do...

Here's a picture of me with Lynn and some of the staff when we took a trip to Niagara Falls for a training. We really enjoyed our time away from the conference! (Lynn is front and center and Niagara is behind us.)