Death of a Teacher, Pt.1 - The Last Sacrifice

“This is not a negotiation.”

Like a fed-up parent shutting down a begging child, my principal asserted herself as the one in control of this dialogue.  Except I was not a begging child, but a 43-year old trans man about to conclude his eighteenth year in education. And the dialogue was centered around what I assumed would be a discussion about how to find common ground around my salary and my roles and responsibilities (R&R) at the school.  Her tone and demeanor indicated so much more than that simple five-word declaration.

It was this past May that this conversation took place.  I left her office feeling defeated because with that little phrase she had slammed my back up against the brick wall of ultimatum.  Her terms were only this: I could remain at the school as the athletic director and keep my full salary but I had to resume a half-time teaching load.  I had fought hard to move out of the classroom in order to focus solely on athletics administration and also to assume some new responsibilities around teacher coaching and after-school management of students in the building. 

My terms, which were clearly moot at this point, were that I wanted to take a pay cut in order to trim the fat off my R&R so I could be dedicated to being an athletic director.  So here I was, put in a real conundrum by the person who had only been leading the school for one year and who had been hired there at the same time I had.  It was late in the school year and I had to decide whether a nice paycheck and good health insurance were worth the inevitable stress of overload that would loom if I agreed to her terms.  This boulder of a critical life decision sat on my shoulders as I left the meeting.

When I came to the second-year charter high school in 2010, I was teaching Literature I to freshmen.  Because the school was so new, there were no Physical Education (PE) classes or Athletics programs in place. But my principal assured me that the following year, I could transition (there has been a lot of transitioning for me in the past several years) into the role of founding PE teacher and Athletic Director.  Prior to moving to Brooklyn in 2010, I had been teaching in Texas public middle and high schools since 1999.  I am certified in Secondary English and Secondary Physical Education, so I had some experience under my belt in teaching PE, coaching sports, and teaching English.  Other roles I worked in were being a Team Leader and an after-school credit recovery computer lab administrator.  I was no spring chicken by the time I was hired in Brooklyn.

The 2011-2012 school year rolled around and here I was, given the chance to start and develop PE and Athletics at the school just as my principal promised.  It was undoubtedly the greatest opportunity I had ever received to show my capabilities.  I could feel that (quite expensive) Master’s in Sport Administration finally starting to pay off.  The PE part was easy for me because I knew exactly what I wanted the PE classes to look and feel like.  Students would be learning about fitness and how to manage their physical wellness by mastering a variety of workouts, using various implements, learning about their bodies, and setting short- and long-term goals for themselves.  These aspects would help my students attain better levels of fitness which would be measured through standardized fitness testing.  I told the students in regards to wearing a prescribed PE uniform that we were a team in this gym and we were going to look like a team.  I told them that when someone walked into this gym and saw them, that person was going to be so impressed with how sharp and focused they looked.  PE classes promptly materialized into kids working very hard and giving incredible effort every day.  My vision for PE classes was coming together quickly and beautifully.

Starting a whole Athletics program, though, was going to be much more daunting than the PE classes and I knew this.  That year, I only had a handful of kids playing basketball.  I was developing/teaching PE, hustling to help my teams get into a league, negotiating a facility usage deal in order to play in the league for free, and coaching the basketball teams.  I have always known my lane and how to stay in it, and I knew that this type of spreading oneself thin was not sustainable.  People cannot occupy multiple lanes and do well.  But for the time being this was what I had to do to get the ball rolling (pun intended).  The only reason this particular year was manageable was because I only had to teach two PE classes a day, both in the afternoon.  Of course, my administration needed me to earn my keep so they also had me teaching a reading class in the morning to struggling readers.  Nothing like multiple preps to help teachers perform better (NOT).

My backwards plan for Athletics was to offer as many sports that we realistically could given our facilities and staffing so that we could someday compete in the Public School Athletic League (PSAL) with high schools from all over NYC.  I knew this could accomplish two things: keeping a significant portion our network's 8th-graders interested in our school and helping our athletes be more visible in order to earn athletic scholarships.  The school had an amazing gym so basketball was a no-brainer.  I wanted to add track/cross country because running is possible anywhere (and I had a staff member who was well-qualified to coach the sport).  We had a small play field on the roof so I developed a soccer league with six-player teams and a smaller goal.  Cheer was a “gimme” because they merely needed some gym space or any other large enough area to practice.  All of these sports also had low overhead and luckily I had found people who wanted to coach these sports.  In 2012 I still had to coach basketball while teaching PE full time and running the Athletics program.  Oh, did I mention I also created a small charter school league so my school would have a better league in which to compete and that would be more conducive to a burgeoning school like us?  Yeah, I did that, too.

So there I was, juggling all of these things but making progress.  More kids were joining sports and I had some solid coaches.  I had formed relationships with other new-ish charter schools who were in a similar situation to us as far as their athletic development.  Somehow, I was hanging in there thus far as I concluded my third year at the school.  Still, I could feel the toll all of this was taking on me.  I was perpetually exhausted and I had to work six days a week, 60-70 hours a week, in order to make everything happen.  I’m no quitter, though, and I had a vision so I kept chugging along.

In the midst of all of this, I began my transition.  On December 1, 2011, I got my first T shot.  On Christmas Eve, just three short weeks later, I had a hysterectomy which was going to happen no matter what due to severe endometriosis.  It turns out that condition was a blessing, if endometriosis could ever be called that, since insurance would cover the procedure.  I missed a minimal amount of work considering the level of that surgery.  In the summer of 2012, I was on this fast-moving transition express: getting my name legally changed and having my top surgery all happened over a two-month period in June and July.  Yet again, despite the intense surgery and the fact that I was a PE teacher and sports coach for a living, I missed a minimal amount of work (top surgery requires several weeks of basically no activity so the scarring is lessened).  I prided myself on being dependable because as far as PE and Athletics went, I was it.  My programs were not going to suffer because I was absent.

As I mentioned before, the 2012-2013 school year was where I could really start to feel the burn.  The one thing that helped me feel a little more upbeat was that I earned my charter school network’s Distinguished Teacher award by meeting certain criteria on the teacher evaluation process they had.  I soldiered on into the 2013-2014 school year where everything started to catch up to me.  My physical health declined: I gained weight, tore my right calf muscle, and threw out my back three times in an eighteen-month period, which meant three ER visits.  The signs were clear that there was no way I could keep up this pace.  Just like Elizabeth Warren, though, still I persisted.

In 2014, I got to hire a full-time men’s basketball coach and PE teacher.  I also had a women’s coach who had been with me for a couple of years so those responsibilities were finally off my plate.  And because basketball was the marquee sport at the school, these were the critical programs that had to be built in order to drive interest in other sports.  The basketball teams were definitely setting the tone.  The basketball coach teaching PE was nice because I had a genuine teaching colleague.  Still, teaching PE (and Health), managing the school’s Athletics program, and running my charter school league was still an intense combination.  I also spent the first month of school in the fog of a cocktail of prescription drugs to manage severe muscle spasms in my back after the third ER trip of the aforementioned ER fun.  However, I could see a ton of progress on all fronts so I kept pushing.

When the 2015-2016 school year came, the school’s founding principal departed and the principal from a different high school in the network stepped in.  Throughout the year he and I discussed our shared belief that the Athletic Director role was better off being solely administrative.  I was thrilled that he shared my vision for this!  Meanwhile, PE classes were going well and all of our sports teams were rocking on all fronts: grades, behavior, and performance successes were piling up.  We added a volleyball team to the mix.  My program was starting to become the juggernaut I envisioned from the outset. 

Finally, in 2016-2017 I was no longer teaching.  I was really able to focus on every detail of taking the Athletics program further.  We were coming off a great season from our men’s basketball program where the JV and Varsity teams won league titles, with the Varsity team recording our first-ever undefeated season so basketball was poised to dominate.  We also finally entered the PSAL so that we could start gunning for hanging with the big dogs in the public schools.  Student-athletes’ grades were steadily improving and they were staying out of trouble.  Kids were staying eligible for whole seasons and committing to the expectations I laid out for them so that our teams would be stable.  By the end of the 2016-2017 school year, my teams amassed eight league titles in three different sports across seven different teams.  The volleyball team also won our inaugural in-network showdown with one of our sister schools.  I also coached electives teachers and worked to be the after-school administrator on duty in our school.

But just as I felt like everything was coming together in 2015-2016, the 2016-2017 school year was where the wheels started falling off.  The school got its third principal in three years (the one mentioned at the beginning of this post).  A total of six teachers did not complete the school year, which I have never experienced in my entire career.  Things had already become strained between my men’s basketball coach and I for various reasons, then he told me eleven days before the JV season was set to start that he was taking a D-II college assistant coaching job.  I had been working hard to coach my teachers, one of whom was one of the teachers who left during the year.  She was brand-new and despite my continual pleas to my principal for additional support for her, the new teacher was not further supported and quit in October.  I was juggling Athletics, teacher coaching, running my league, managing the school after hours, trying to support the departing teacher’s class (French) until we hired a new teacher, and then on-boarding that new teacher (Art).  I was still wearing many hats and though I was less exhausted overall, I was still having to operate with the needle in the red all the time.

To truly encapsulate the seven years I gave to that school is incredibly difficult but hopefully I have successfully provided a glimpse of the sacrifices it took to build my athletics program.  Many people understand what it takes to build something: a business, a career, a work team, a family.  But to build something that somebody essentially ripped from my hands is difficult to cope with.  It negated the better part of a decade of my life, time I cannot get back but that I would feel more glad to have given if I could still direct my program to its fruition.  Currently, it feels like a life cut tragically short.

The psychological and emotional toll this end has taken on me has been devastating.  I do my best to carry it silently and to cope with it in as healthy a fashion as possible, but oftentimes I feel paralyzed with anger, fear, and betrayal...  (To be continued in Pt. 2)