Thursday, November 27, 2008

Camp moves to Lake in the Woods.

Sometimes it becomes necessary to pack up Camp and move to a better place. Eventually, there just aren't enough places to bury excrement and you have to move to a new place, farther from Edmonds. Of course, it doesn't help matters when many of the people around your Camp are burying their waste under your tent.

There was a great opportunity, not long ago, to make the Camp a permanent base and build a house with all of the necessary amenities to support a robust and vibrant place. Unfortunately, this Camp was overlooked as the great and vital resource that it was. Now, the Camp is moving further north.

With the uprooting of this Camp, the organization of wolves will rejoice in that no future Camps will be established and money will be saved by allowing staff to wander around with no particular direction in mind. Some will sleep for hours at a time, locked in a latrine. Others will smuggle materials to distant locations for use at their private, personal place.

A Camp offers the opportunity for nomadic people to return to a common place where ideas and stories can be shared. Without a Camp, such nomadic people will just wander aimlessly without the benefit of a unified community. As wanderers, they will be more easily picked off by wolves and budgetary predators.

Without the hope of another Camp, the outcome is obvious; wandering nomads, without the benefit of a map, will quickly get lost. These wanderers may find themselves at the Shoreline, Cape Flattery, Northshore, Kettle Falls, Mount Vernon, Mercer Island or Lake Stevens. Can we really afford to have these people wander off to new territories?

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay, you are trying to tell us something... But what?

Anonymous said...

Ok, let's play 20 questions. 1. Are you talking about moving the ESC to the new site?

ESD15.org said...

No. The mystery deepens.

Anonymous said...

Question 2: Is the main subject animal, vegetable or mineral?

Anonymous said...

Here's my entry.

In "The Good Old Days," freshly minted teachers frequently got their first jobs in places like Cle Elum and Soap Lake. Pay was low and resources were limited but you had fewer students and very supportive parents who smiled at you and called you by your first name at the grocery store. You learned your craft "in the provinces." As your skills grew, you moved toward the population centers where the pay was better and the resources more suitable. Eventually, after, say, ten years, you were teaching in Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane or one of their suburban communities. You were good at your craft, administrators respected what you could do and you were paid well for it.

In the 70's the state adopted a uniform pay scale for teachers statewide and little by little the whole thing reversed itself. Big city teachers moved to the smaller, slower towns and the big city schools (and their suburbs) had to take on more of the freshly minted teachers. It's a whole lot different learning your craft with 32 students(5 periods a day) in your classroom instead of 22. Society changed. The parents are very busy trying to make ends meet: two jobs, or single parent families, or a combination of fulltime and part-time jobs. NCLB created 37 ways in which a school can be labeled a "failure" along with its staff. A hot shot administrator who knows little about the classroom other than something they read in a book for a class (because s/he got out of the classroom as soon as they could to go for the really big bucks) demanding that s/he knows how to get better results where you see only more paperwork. (And very few of them offer to lead by example, teaching a class or two to demonstrate what they want you to do.)

"If I go to Cle Elum or Soap Lake, I'll be able to buy a house for 1/2 to 2/3 what is costs in the urban area, it won't take 45 minutes each way to get to work, parents will be busy but supportive of my efforts, the kids won't be competing with each other to see who can be 'badder,' I'll have small classes and I'll get paid the same. I'm not appreciated here; why stay?"

Or maybe not.

Anonymous said...

Next question, 2. Are you talking about members of the administrative team moving to new "camps"?

ESD15.org said...

I was trying to be mysterious.

The main subject is an animal, though his fur is exceptionally well combed and his limbs are a little bloated from repetitive motion.

He has been known to frequently manipulate electrons.

Anonymous said...

This is an insult to all who work in maintenance,..............unless it was an attempt at sarcasm,...........then its funny

Anonymous said...

The district is losing one great Maint. employee. Bruce Camp has so much history and experience I am really sorry to see him go but am glad for him because it sounds like a great opportunity. I will miss you Bruce.

Linda H says

Anonymous said...

Popeye visits Maintenance Dept

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPulJzMIzck

Anonymous said...

why is Bruce Camp leaving? well just look at the dip sh#t running it now.

Anonymous said...

Remember management's oft stated motto, "If you don't like it here, you can go somewhere else."

While that is certainly true, it is a poor substitute for actually managing your work force, especially when those who choose to "go someplace else" are replaced by the poorly qualified friends and relatives of those who told the good workers to "go someplace else" in the first place.

Why is it that there is no one with any authority to put a stop to this nonsense? (That is a rhetorical question.)

Anonymous said...

Bruce Camp is an excellent employee and now the District is losing him to another District; he actually has a new position, which is a supervisory position. Do you think the "District" gives a hoot -I think NOT! Any one with an ounce of brain is a threat to the second floor! I wish Bruce well in his new endeavor.