Fadedwords

I’ve been quite sick the last three days… in fact yesterday I came in to work long enough to make sure the PSATs started smoothly and then I went home and proceeded to sleep until about 2 in the afternoon.

Today I’m feeling physically a bit better, but emotionally I’m completely overwhelmed.

Lack of communication in the district I’m working in is seriously going to be one of the things that drives me absolutely out of my mind.

The state of North Carolina requires that all students, upon entering 8th grade, will take the Computer Skills Test. Not only must they take it, but they must pass it in order to receive a high school diploma. They can take it as often as they need to, but they have to pass it before they’ll be issued a diploma on graduation day. For some students, it takes 8 times to pass the test. Kids in our district just don’t have adequate access to computers, and the test is very difficult without having the opportunity to practice all of the applications.

I was told three weeks before the test that I was responsible for entering all the information about every student into the computers and doing all the scheduling. This was stressful enough… but then a week and a half ago I was also told that I was responsible for the PSATs and making those happen. I was stressed and frustrated that nobody had told me before then that I was in charge of all the testing.

I handled it though. PSATs went off fairly smoothly, although we were short 22 test booklets due to the lack of planning by others in the district and the short notice to me that we’d have the test. But it went fine.

Starting last Friday we started having network issues, and on Tuesday we were told that we wouldn’t be able to begin the computer skills exam like we’d planned. So we rescheduled those children for a testing window on next Tuesday. There were no students schedule to test for computer skills yesterday because of PSAT… so today we had about 44 more kids scheduled to take computer skills. I called the IT department at about 7:40am to see if we could, and left a voicemail. Nobody called me back, and the internet was working, so we figured we could go ahead. I also had a note from the testing coordinator at the central office with the testing schedule, and the windows for today and tomorrow were still open.

We started an hour late this morning, because no one had told us that my password and username could be used to log into the kids’ section of the test to get them started. We finally got them going though, and the late start was no big deal because they’re supposed to have as long as they need to finish anyway. Well, at 10:50am all of the kids got kicked out of the test.

I called IT and the director said, “Y’all weren’t supposed to start testing until next week.” I told him that nobody had told us that, and we now had 14 kids who’d been booted out and may’ve lost their whole test. He sounded frustrated that we’d gone ahead and done it because he’d told the assistant principal. So I said that nobody had told us that we couldn’t, and that my schedule from central office still said that today and tomorrow were test dates. He said he’d call me back.

Eventually the assistant principal called and spoke to one of the other proctors. He said, “You weren’t given permission to give the test so you shouldn’t have.” *insert much cursing and hair pulling out* We weren’t given permission??? I have a piece of paper on my desk from central office that shows that we were testing today and tomorrow. We spoke with the LEA on the phone this morning and he was giving us the information we needed to get into the computer system so kids could test. It would’ve been nice if someone had taken five seconds out of their busy schedule in order to let us know that we couldn’t test, rather than going on the assumption that we should know not to because we hadn’t been given permission.

Now I have to wait until Monday to reschedule the whole test… and figure out if the kids who finished the test will have their info saved, and the kids who got booted out if what they did finish got saved.

It’s like this all the time, and I’m completely frustrated. Nobody talks to anyone. Nobody picks up the phone to call anyone or answers their email or voicemail. If the IT guy had answered the message I left him at 7:45 (a full hour before the test was actually started), we wouldn’t have had a problem.

These are the days I really hate being a school counselor.