'Tis Summit

Every Friday, we have Community Hours after school.  Any kid who is tardy to class has to serve 30 minutes for every time they are tardy.  As a result, I have very few tardies.  In fact, I have only one class when I ever have tardies...and it's the same three kids.

Today, my colleague had a brilliant idea for community hours.  During the week, he asked families if they had any strings of lights that they wanted to donate to the school.  Lots of people brought in decorations and we spent two hours after school stringing the beams in our school with lights.  I want to point out that it was mostly my juniors who were doing the decorating, although most of them were just there to hang out, without having to serve community hours.  The school looks amazing.  We have beams across our hallways and they are all wound with twinkling lights.  I will definitely take pictures next week.  All the kids after school kept saying how great it looked and how they'd never seen a school decorated with lights.  It really looks pretty.  I know that lights have a Christmas connotation, but I hope we can talk with kids about how it doesn't have to be that way.  We have lights in our school because we want to feel good about it in these last two tough weeks.  We have only 5 more days to teach curriculum before our 5 days of finals.  Everyone is busy and stressed.  And on top of the school work, there's the county hearing on Monday.  We're having an after school pizza party on Monday before the hearing for kids who are going to the meeting and for them to make posters.  How cute!  My school is a great place for kids.  

I had such a great time with my students after school.  They were up on chairs and tables, stringing lights through the ceiling tiles (plugs are very hard to find in my school as it turns out), checking strings for dead bulbs...and we had to kick them out of the school.  It's become a thing at my school where we actually have to ask kids to leave at the end of the day.  At 5:15 on a Friday, there were still kids hanging out.  Many were helping with lights, but there was a crew of kids just there.  I love that about my school.  A bunch of kids got up to talk at school meeting about why they are planning to be at the hearing on Monday.  Listening to kids say that, at Summit, they are comfortable hanging out with students of other races, that despite major learning disabilities they are conquering their AP classes, and that they want their voices heard loud and clear to this county.  They love Summit!