Day 45

The Dave Ross stuff was interesting. I never went to the park to see the crowd, but we could hear them quite a few times! Unlike many radio talk show hosts, Ross tried to give everyone equal time — and grilled them all equally, as well! The school board member who was there (wow, they do make public appearances after all!) did not do terribly well. He was uninformed about a lot of stuff that was happening in the district, often was caught without much of an answer, tried to evade many topics (Ross usually asked again, at least), and in general dropped the ball more often than he caught it, I thought. The union president did much better, but she wasn't batting a thousand (to mangle my sports metaphors a bit), either. One of the challengers running for school board got off to a poor start, but did much better after that, and came across as having a good grasp of the issues and what they meant for the district. Overall, I thought the whole exercise did a good job of presenting the issues, and the concerns the teachers had. While I doubt it changed a lot of minds — by now I'm sure everyone is either pro-district, pro-teacher, or just sick and tired of the whole thing and can we just get the kids to school, please? — at least I hope more people understand why this strike started and is still going on after so long.

For me, the big story was actually the weather. We have a big storm system moving through right now. Fortunately it didn't rain much in Marysville, but there sure was a lot of wind! It was hard to manage the sign a few times, especially at the one corner we turn. I had an extra hard time of it, as I was also handling my radio. I accidentally clonked a few of my colleagues with my sign, it was blowing around so much — and even managed to hit myself a couple of times!

Tomorrow is a rest day. We've been through a lot this week, and now it's time to refresh ourselves for whatever comes next week. When we were told this on the line, I added, "Yeah, we might actually be in our classrooms next week." Then again, I've been this optimistic more than once in the last few weeks…