The week before the board meeting
Before anything is installed
It is the week before the board meeting. She has an agenda item: what the district is doing for these kids. She is holding three things — the counselor’s appointment log, the attendance report, and what three principals told her on the phone. All three measure the same thing: the students who already came in on their own. About the ones who did not, she has not got a single line, and those are exactly the ones she loses sleep over.
The moment it earns its keep
At the close of the whole months, the language split. She had assumed her students read in English, because they speak English at school. If most of the taps turn out to have happened in Spanish, that does not come from anywhere else she has — not the log, not the survey, not the principals. And it changes decisions already on her desk: who she hires this year, which language the letter home is printed in, and what hour the counselor’s office stays open.