One day soon I'll give a blog about my first to weeks being here and what they looked like. But today my time is crunched and I won't be able to write that much. Last night we were allowed to present at the school board meeting, one of our most significant steps forward to date. To set up that story, this one is necessary. I'll hopefully be able to post about the school board meeting in the next few days. Enough introduction.
One of the first things I was able to do upon coming to FranCo was meet Alan Janney for lunch. Alan was an Area Director in Radford, Virginia for five years before moving to Franklin County to teach. He and his wife have been involved with our committee and as soon as he heard I was in town he invited me out to the school for lunch. After we talked vision for the school for about twenty minutes or so the bell rang and he had to get back to teaching. As I went to leave though I wanted to see if I could set up a meeting with the school's principal; Deb Decker.
Deb Decker is a busy woman. After being bounced around to three different people I was told that she made her own appointments and that if I wanted to meet with her I could find her in the lunch room to set up an appointment. As I made my way into the cafeteria I saw that she was the only person in the room. After brief introductions we set up a meeting for the following day at 1:30. I was surprised that she could meet with me so soon and left feeling nervous but excited about meeting with her the next days.
When you are thrown into the fire it is easy to see how truly under qualified you are. For the rest of the day and the next morning as I talked to Steve Schmitt among others planning out what I was going to say I realized that I had no idea what I was doing. I knew Young Life, I knew what it could be at FCHS but I had no idea how to communicate that to the principal of a school to whom you can't really say "Hey, I'm just a 22 year-old guy who wants to come into your school and hang out with high school kids. But don't worry, its not creepy, we talk about Jesus too."
But the Lord's power is made perfect in our weakness. Going in my prayer was that we would be able to have access to the school. That is so crucial to Young Life because it allows leaders a place where they can go and meet every single student at the school. There is no other place that offers that. There are tons of kids at football games, the local McDonalds and the local YMCA, but none that have the entire student body. That's why is it so important for us to have a working relationship with administration and be able to be involved in the day to day life at the school. To truly have a presence there. I knew the Principal Decker had the keys to that and I hoped she would see what incredible things could come from it.
The meeting went well. Instead of the 15 minutes I thought I would have, we met for over an hour. She even brought in the Director of Curriculum about halfway through to discuss how we could make this work. At the end of the meeting no decisions were made and I was left with the sense that it could be a while before things were decided upon. I felt that she wanted to make it work, but she just wasn't sure how she could. Separation of church and state is a tricky thing to work out. Its something that when done wrong can cause absolutely chaos between parents and administration. We realized that what were dealing with was fragile, and so she said she would get back to me in a few days.
So I went home and I prayed. I knew there was nothing I could do at that point. Really there was nothing I could do at any point, but I felt a healthy sense of helplessness as I drove back. Luckily I had a three day training session at Lake Champion to take my mind off of it. Lake Champion is a Young Life camp in New York and all of the first year Staff Associates and their trainers went up for three days to set the tone for the rest of the year; again a blog for another day. However, while up there I snuck away and used the computer in the kitchen office to see if they had sent me something. It turned out they had; and invitation to speak in front of the school board in 5 days. They wanted to decision to be one that the whole school board could stand behind. They said that if we couldn't present in five days we would have to wait until the October meeting. We knew the time was then, so we began preparing.
CLIFFHANGER!
More to come soon. I'm sorry for the spelling and gramatical errors. Get it? Gramatical errors?
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