My mom always told me life wasn't fair...

As you can surmise by my previous post, my reign as king of the band geeks (at least as the monarch of the band geeks at my current school) has come to an unexpected end.

I've been the director here for 12 years (actually 11.6 if you count that the first year I was only part time. In the end it doesn't matter that I did a fabulous job, that I imparted musical wisdom, that I fostered a love of music making, or that I built the program in a matter of 2 years from a part time job to overflowing. When the bean-counters at the district office looked at declining enrollment at the high school in my district, they decided we had 1 too many music teachers and had to RIF the junior guy. Even after 11.6 years, that would be me.

I saw trouble brewing 2 or 3 years ago when our district passed a bond that would result in expanding my school while closing another building. I realized then that we would have 1 too many band directors in the district. I asked the union president (who was the other band director) about impending doom and she told me "don't worry about it." So I didn't.

To complicate matters more, there are other music teachers who have certification outside of music. Those people could either step aside and teach those other subjects full time, or part-time in addition to part-time music, or the district could involuntarily transfer them to those positions and save my job, but for some reason no one is willing to do that.

It seems that unions will fight to the death to save an incompetent teacher who is about to be let go. There was one such teacher at my spouses school. The administration tried for years until he finally resigned on his own. Why then, when (and I don't mean to toot my own horn too much here) they have a competent, popular, successful band director all the union can do is step aside and say "well, it looks like the district followed procedure."

Honestly, it's frustrating enough to make me consider whether I should stay in education at all. But then, my mother always told me "life's not fair."