First Day of School and He Made the Front Page, Again!

Our local daily paper tries to cover much news and human interest stories. We enjoy reading the paper each morning, and only get annoyed when the paper delivery is late. So imagine our surprise to find the boy on the front page, again.




The husband saw it first and thought somehow I already knew and  kept asking me if there was anything I wanted to tell him. I searched the memory, racking my brain to find a morsel of information that I may have overlooked telling him, especially since he was looking at the paper while asking me.



Finally, I just crossed the room to the table to take a look. There it was. . .the front page photo of the first day of school. It made me smile! Man, is he growing up so quickly.



This is the second time the boy’s photo has been featured on the front page—click here to read about the first time. This makes a total of 4 times his picture has been in the paper plus numerous other times his name has been included. I say he’s living a charmed life.



The photographer/reporter and I have some history, not that it mattered in this case, as I don’t think he would have put the two of us together. Amazingly, I was just talking about him to a friend at the local pool on Sunday. You see, there was an event that happened that had a potential tragic ending involving an Amber Alert for a child. It was the photographer/reporter for this photo that called me later that day to tell me all was well with the child who was missing. He didn’t have to call. I had even turned him away from answering questions earlier in the day due to direct orders from my supervisor, even those this reporter and I had worked together previously. So, again, he didn’t have to call. But amidst all the chaos and surprising news, that reporter took a moment to phone me at home. I will always remember and be grateful for that kind and caring moment when he thought of me because he knew I would want to know.



So, what’s next for the boy and when we he show up next in the news living his charmed life? Who knows!!

School Days, School Days

Today was the first day of school for the boy and for many other children in our community and around the state.

It is amazing how much of our schedule and the community’s schedule is designed around the attendance calendar for schools and school district.



To graduate from college, I had to pass the writing competency exam. By evidenced in this blog, the exam did not scare me away from writing. What I remember is the topic I chose from the list of given topics. While I don’t remember the other choices, I remember writing about society’s dependence on the agrarian calendar. . . which we still use today, at least in our community, to design our school year.

I also remember our previous Governor taking great strides to plant seeds with recent high school graduates at the National Governor’s Convention held in our state a few years ago to imagine schooling, including attendance calendars, differently than how they as students might have experienced schooling. I thought. . . how smart! These recent high school graduates were products of our current system and within the next decade would likely have a child entering the school system. What better candidates to envision a different system? As that is what keeps our system from changing . . . people who have experienced it, were successful or semi successful and don’t understand why it would need to be any different for their children. Maybe someday, we will be less tied to, less married to, less dependent on the agrarian calendar, as I wrote about over twenty years ago.