T.G.I.F.

Friday, Friday...

Today I am especially glad for the end of the week as it has felt like an especially a long one between the snow storm and school.  The tension in my school is palpable.  Next year the schools of Romania will undergo a massive change.  Ninth grade will move from its current place in high schools to general schools.  General schools will now house students grades in 0-9.  This means that my school will be shrinking.  

In the foreign language department, there will be one less English teaching position due to a ridiculously complicated situation.  First, I have to start at the beginning of the school year.  In Romania teachers are assigned to schools by an inspector at a county level based on the number of points they have. The points are allocated on credentials and certificates that the teachers have. Teachers with higher numbers of points can bump teachers with lower numbers of points from positions.  Teachers with higher points generally work in cities, while teachers who are starting their careers with lower numbers of points tend to end up in village school where conditions can be rough (for example, a village school I visited had no running water). At the start of this school there was a new English teacher assigned to my school, in the place of the teacher I shared a room with last year.  No one in the school knew who she was, but they knew that she had more points that the other teacher. However, as the school year started, she never showed up.  Apparently, she elected to take a year of unpaid leave instead of teaching.  At this point, it was too late to get the teacher from the previous year back so all the teachers had to divide the classes that were supposed to go to the new teacher.

Fast forward to now, as I said before, there will be one less position as we technically have four positions now, though there are three teachers doing the work. There are three English positions now (I am not including myself, as I don't factor into these discussion) and there will be three next year.  However, one position has to be held for the teacher who decided to be on leave this year.  Thus the three teachers who are teaching this year have to compete for only two positions. They were given the notice this week and then had to prepare their accreditation files. The board will then decide who has positions next year based on the number of points the teacher has.   From my understanding, there won't be interviews just evaluations of their files.  This week the teachers were rushing around like mad trying to get their files prepared, it seems they were just given a few days notice.  Everyone finally got their files prepared and now the waiting begins.