This morning at 7:30 I had the interview with the Learning for Leadership Charter School (LLCS) in Northeast Minneapolis. It went well. The school is small -- only about 150 students for grades K-11. It is project-based learning, so there is a lot of art and exhibit-type stuff everywhere, very much like Museum Magnet, where I am working now.
The social worker there, Shelly, is only in her first year at LLCS. She has a business with another person, which contracts out social work services to charter schools, that often can't afford full-time social workers. So she is only at LLCS two days out of the week, while the other half of the week she is at two other schools. I liked her a lot, she seemed very open to me creating the type of field experience that I want. Apparently the school is very open to trying new techniques and being creative. They focus a lot on restorative justice and doing peacemaking circles, etc. The drawbacks to the position are that it is her first time working as a field instructor, so she hasn't really had a lot of experience with interns before. There could be benefits to this as well, I'm sure. Another drawback is the location -- it's a 25 minute drive under good traffic conditions, meaning in the winter it could equal some long travel times. But I suppose I've been spoiled living so close to my current job.
After work I had a second interview, this one at Wellstone Elementary in downtown St. Paul. The location is much better -- an easy 10 minute drive from my apartment. I was excited about this interview because Julianne, the social worker, seemed really great when I spoke to her on the phone. I had also heard excellent things about the principal at Wellstone. It ended up being an awesome interview, and I left feeling really excited. Wellstone is a magnet school, but its magnet is basic skills, so there isn't really a special type of draw, such as the science & technology at Museum. However, Julianne told me that they have been trying to work towards making it a social justice magnet school, which would sort of work perfectly with it being the Paul & Sheila Wellstone School.
The school serves a very diverse group of kids, with many ELL (English Language Learner) students -- especially because there was a small Language Academy within the building that last year was shut down because they weren't meeting their annual yearly progress. So Wellstone ended up absorbing all of the bilingual (I think mostly Spanish-speaking) students from there. Before that, they had been working towards creating a bilingual classroom for each grade at the rate of about 1-2 a year, but after the Language School closed that went out the window and they had to immediately adopt bilingual classrooms on all grade levels. Other major populations the school serves are Somali, Kenyan, Ethiopian, etc.
What I really liked was that Julianne was just extremely open about letting me make this into the experience that I want, similar to Shelly in the morning. She said that she could train me on doing assessments and IEPs (Individualized Education Programs -- for special ed services), facilitating my own groups, doing advocacy and public policy type stuff or whatever else I might want to do. She seems to have really taken a lot of initiative and created some really awesome programming at the school. She told me that about 50% of her time is spent doing direct practice, which in a culture of over-worked social workers with mounds of paperwork, that is a truly wonderful thing.
Tomorrow I have an interview in the afternoon at the Plymouth Christian Youth Center School. I will write in on how it goes! I can already tell that this is going to end up being a tough decision...
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