Isn’t there someone who gets paid to do that?

On Wednesday, a meeting scheduled to last an hour somehow extended itself at least an extra 93 minutes. I know, because I counted every tick of my Flava Flav clock that I wear to staff meetings to keep time. The meeting involved all of the teachers on staff, but it wasn’t a status-of-the-school staff meeting, but rather, a school-vision-and-mission-and-student-body-composition-and-state-mandated-restructuring staff meeting. Needless to say, as a third-month teacher, I don’t have much to add to these conversations, beyond the pragmatic, “Wrap it up, B”:

Obviously the problems of meetings beyond the scope and experience level of the staff are not endemic to the education industry, but I feel that other entities probably have more capital to invest in an outside organization to do the [grunt/boring/tedious/hard] work. I feel that the more efficient way of achieving this “new vision/design” would have been through educational consultants who can come up with a handful of plans based on interviews with senior members of the staff who have the best idea of where the school came from and where it should go. While I understand the importance of the egalitarian method that this school is attepmting to use, all it achieves is a cyclic arguments that devolve into scheduling discussions. This ad hoc methodology that is currently in effect is going to get us to one place: where we are, having the Charter School Board tell us that the school, once again, isn’t making the grade.