I felt more than a little apprehension. I was in morning rush hour traffic, driving to downtown St. Louis from the close-in suburb where I lived. It was something of a new experience. I hadn’t driven in rush-hour traffic since leaving Houston 25 years earlier. The apprehension wasn’t about traffic; I had stepped outside my career experience and accepted a job with St. Louis Public Schools. And I was early; the hours were 8 to 5, but I decided to be there by 7:30.
Except for nine months at a newspaper straight out of college, my career had been exclusively corporate communications: employee communications, crisis communications, media relations, environmental communications, and speechwriting. Especially speechwriting. Even for the three years I had had my own consulting business, I worked for companies, doing mostly speechwriting.
Corporations have their moments of craziness and crisis, but they pale in comparison to urban school districts. And yet, here I was, driving to my first day on the job at the largest school district in the state of Missouri, a district that had been in crisis for years and was now in hyper-crisis.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Photograph via St. Louis Public Schools.
Some Wednesday Readings
End Game at Appomattox – Mike Phifer at Warfare History Network.
Millennials Tried Being Angry. It Didn’t Work – Samuel D. James at Digital Liturgies.
A Memo in the Wilderness: Why does the Church of England now sound like an HR department? – James Martin Charlton at the Critic Magazine.
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