The officers came out of the supply room with the evidence of their dalliance being a little disheveled. They tucked in their shirts and straightened out their uniform pants as they exited opposite ends of the school building. This had been reported to me by a colleague who had witnessed them leaving the supply room before. I had been admonishing my colleague to watch what was going on around us and not to be too myopic when dealing with our environment. It was easy to do. We have so many hours of classroom instruction, our facility reports, tickets written to prisoners for not attending school, evaluations of our students, and our school utilization reports were burdens that our current administrators thought were justifications for their high paying employment. With our work load I failed to understand what my colleague was trying to tell me. The ramifications of that observation would effect my program in the most negative way later in my career. For now, we were operating at full capacity. Seven classroom hours a day left little time for writing reports. Unfortunately, I became myopic with the demands of this work load. The very same thing was happening to all the educators in the school. We all had unmanageable work loads and were chastised for not turning reports in on time.
I continued to focus on Horticulture. We had over three hundred house plants in our greenhouse propagated from cuttings by my students. We developed a program of donating those plants to our local community hospitals, senior citizen centers, nursing homes, and all the offices in our facility that wanted them. Our warden made sure that his office, his assistant’s office, our lobbies and visiting areas all had hanging houseplants or large floor plants. Sometimes both. We exchanged plants when needed, and doctored those that needed immediate attention before sending them back healthy again. We could replace them immediately with new plants when needed and our staff often visited the greenhouse looking for new plants to replace the ones they “over loved.” Too much water and not enough light as evidenced by our long cold winters had us replacing plants on a very regular basis. Even though I would instruct staff that house plants don’t need as much water during the winter months but we would still have to try to revive the drowned brought back to our greenhouse. It was a thriving business model and would go on for many years. The joy it brought our immediate community was evidenced by letters of thanks sent to our warden who in turn shared them with us on a regular basis. It was uplifting and my students appreciated the accolades.
As in life, all good things must come to an end. “Toutes les bonnes choses ont une fin” Ten years into the house plant business contraband was found in a house plant container on a secretary’s desk in one of the administrative school building suites. My program was completely shut down and searches began in my classroom, and greenhouse. The plants in my room were emptied into the middle of it. (Thank God I asked they not carpet my room when they carpeted the other classrooms.) Books and videos were pulled from the shelves and thrown throughout the room after being searched. The same search was conducted in the greenhouse. The staff who had acquired plants from our program were asked to search their plant containers for contraband. I would be on pins and needles for the next three months as a much less friendlier education administration took control over the school
This incident would make the current education administration less promotable, and could keep them from reaching the next step in their career ladders. They were not happy with me. In the beginning I was not informed of what the contraband was, or what I was being suspected of. The tutors I had working for me were assigned to different areas not in the school. I was allowed to keep two of the six I had working for me because they had only begun working for the school a short time. Two of the six were transferred to other facilities, and I decided at that point the house plant business was over. After three months of investigations, turmoil and stress, I felt it was in my best interest to eliminate that part of my curriculum My students would till be taught how to produce and care for house plants but on a much smaller scale. The plants made a very interesting compost pile as I emptied the greenhouse. I was finally informed by our school officer the details of what the contraband was, and it shocked me. I was not prepared for what was told to me, and I wondered why our new school administrators had not been the ones to inform me. I felt betrayed and did not view them favorably. I am sure my feelings were mutual. I again began to question why was I working here?
TO BE CONTINUED …
Psalms 91:1-16
MJ-Way 