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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Today was our annual Bloodmobile. While it requires a large portion of planning and coordinating, the work is fairly simple, it more or less all falls into place, and it's great watching students performing such a selfless act of humanitarian effort. Well, we like to think they're doing that but the truth is, the students see it a way to get out of a class for an hour.

The event has been on the calendar for months. Posters advertising it have been up for weeks. I've given information about over the announcements for weeks, too. Teachers knew what day it was, they also knew that student council members would be requesting to be absent from class to help, and they also knew that students would miss classes in order to donate. I have no idea how long student council has been hosting Bloodmobile, but they've been doing it long before I came on staff or agreed to be a co-sponsor of student council. So, to say that an email and the actions of one teacher irked me over the last couple of days is to say the least.

After a verbal altercation with another teacher during Bloodmobile last year, I made it perfectly clear to teachers that if they had questions or concerns, they needed to contact my fellow co-sponsor or myself before the day of Bloodmobile. A teacher did contact me about three students. One of them is a student council member who requested to be absent from her class today to help. Fair enough. The other two students signed up to donate blood. Being teenagers, they of course picked the one class they didn't want to attend today and that happened to be her class. I emailed her back to tell her that I would see what could be done to reschedule them, but made no promises about it. We managed to reschedule one students but the other was not able to be rescheduled. I understood her concern, but our big drive in our building this year is to bring back a spirit of character and integrity amongst the student body, and community service is a part of that. Besides, it wasn't as if we were requesting they be absent all week.

The student who couldn't be rescheduled came into Bloodmobile and told me that the teacher was angry. He explained to her that we were unable to reschedule and she told him education was more important. HUH?! Since when was saving a life not as important as education? A minor incident put us thirty minutes behind schedule and the student in question spent almost two hours at Bloodmobile from the time he came to check in to the time he left the canteen. Said teacher came out of her room searching for the student and another and demanded they tell her why they hadn't come back to her class. They explained, and when my co-sponsor went to speak to her about it, she turned away and left. He tried to track her down but apparently didn't hear him or ignored him.

Personally, I find her behavior inexcusable and unprofessional. We all were in agreement that we wanted to build a more positive atmosphere in our school and focus on character building and integrity. Bloodmobile is a prime opportunity to do this. Even before school started, I spoke with the principal about issues we'd had in the past with teachers confronting us and demanding to know a student's whereabouts during Bloodmobile even after receiving information on how the day would work. She indicated that it would not be a problem because it was one day out of the year and it was a great way to give back to the community and show the community that great things do happen at our school.

The incident which put us behind required that we remove students from the room to another location where we could ensure their safety and whereabouts. Essentially, we were covering ourselves. The issue I had last year came from a teacher in the same department. They are always the ones to complain the most when we try something different or when their routine must be interrupted. I understand. I don't like my routine interrupted either, but as educators, we know we must prepare for last-minute change. It wasn't as if we weren't supervising these students, and had something happened on a more serious scale, we would have to have accounted for the location of the students in the room at the time. If they had gone back to class, the responsibility and blame
would have landed squarely on the shoulders of my co-sponsor and I.

It baffles me that adults have to discourage students from doing good things in the name of getting their own way.

The Purple Marking Pen

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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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