It’s been a crazy, crazy week! One of the reasons I’ve not been around much here, neither to write or read. But I survived and now I’m two weeks off. TWO whole weeks … I can’t tell you how good that feels, lol.
Last week was full of meetings, preparations and teaching. The meetings were all about next school year as our school will move from one town to another. It will be too much to explain here as it involves politics and finances (sigh!!!) but the bottom line is that as a result of a change in the national politics view on education and financing my school needs to move to another town to be able to survive. That meant we had to obtain permission from several boards of directors ( we are a special needs school and we are partially (partly?) paid for by regular schools), at least two city councils (the current one and the one we will move to) and the Secretary of Education. It took us almost two years to get all the signatures but we managed and now we are planning to move.
For the next three years we will keep two schools in operation as we have to shut down our current school gradually. So this week we were told who will move and who will stay. For now I’m staying in our “old” school, which suits me fine as it is only a five minute bike ride from home. It will become a 45 minute bike ride in the future :(
Anyway, after that I had to focus on the end-of-year musical. We are writing it ourselves this year and I’m in charge of all the songs. So that took a lot of thinking and talking to colleagues who offered to help.
And to top it off nicely we had an extra sports event this week. On Tuesday the 30th our Queen Beatrix will abdicate and we will have the inauguration of our new king Willem-Alexander. To celebrate all primary schools in the Netherlands took part in a national “King’s Breakfast” and the “Kings Games”, as sports event. Breakfast was catered for by a large grocery store in a massive show of organizational skills that went surprisingly smooth – they managed to send breakfasts to 6500 schools (for over one million kids) in just a few days!
The sports event we had to organize ourselves but every city council offered to help with facilities and expertise. And one million children all got the same shirt to wear … another hurdle the organization managed to take smoothly. It was brilliant!
As we had a project week about Africa going on last week (yes, another part of this crazy week) we already organized a sponsored walk to help build schools in Cameroon (see my previous post) so that was our sports event. It was great fun of course!
And now I have two weeks off. I mostly slept yesterday as I was dead tired and today I’m packing my bags. I’ll be off with brother & co for a short vacation. As we both live near the coast we love to go to the woods sometimes so that’s what we will do this week. Yay!
(photo from Internet)
So, you can look forward to a blog about the inauguration and a blog about my vacation somewhere next weekend ;)
Riete's place 