Twenty-Eight Years in Education
The Joys and Sorrows of a Life in Public Education
by
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In the summer of 1973 I left Bushing and accepted a job in Smallville Wisconsin as elementary principal. About the third or fourth week of my first year I noticed at lunch one day, as I supervised the lunch room, this stormy looking young boy carrying his tray to a table. He caught my attention as he was wearing a lavender blouse with lace around his neck and cuffs and down the front. I asked Ruby the teacher’s aide who also assisted in supervising the lunchroom who that kid was in the lavender blouse and she replied, “Oh, that’s Jamie.”
“Why does his mother have him wearing a girl’s blouse?” I immediately determined I was going to have to call this woman and get her straightened out as I considered what she was doing to this boy to be child abuse.
Ruby replied, “Oh, Jamie Bolmsted is not a boy. She’s a girl.”This fact was even more incredulous, her hair was cut like the hair of a Marine Corp recruit in boot camp. I mean it was not a quarter of an inch long, a fact which I considered more abusive than a boy in a lavender blouse, if that is possible.
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About the Book
What would you do as an elementary principal if an eight year old girl ran into your office with panic on her face and shouted, “Mr. Patrick, Ruby said come quick. Some men are aiming guns at the kids on the playground. Would you run to face the presumed killers or would you run the other way? And would you cry when you arrived at work one morning as the high school principal to be told a boy you cared for, but had to expel for drug use, had committed suicide the night before? Would you wrap your arms around the crying senior girl, a woman physically, but who had a little girl inside who feared her mother would die? And would you not swell with pride when a troubled young man, who had graduated the previous year, threw his arms around you and said, “I owe it all to you Mr. Patrick.”? This was a boy who everyone, including the school board, had regarded as an evil intelligent boy who should be expelled. You alone stood as a buffer between his critics and him. These then are some of the highs and lows of being an educator.
About the Author
The author is a man who spent twenty-eight years in education, from teacher to superintendent. In this book he shares with you the joy of watching a young man graduate whom everyone had written off as useless and the pain of learning a favored, if flawed, young man had committed suicide.