Vicky Larson tightly gripped both sides of the ladder propped up against the blackboard as she climbed back down to the ground. She clapped the chalk dust off of her hands and then stepped back to admire the newest addition to her classroom: a full-scale world map. She had hesitated for a few days over whether or not to hang the map in the first place. It wasn't like she was going to be quizzing kindergarteners over world capitals. But it was one of the few things she was able to keep from her old classroom, the first classroom she ever taught in, so she wanted to hang onto it, for sentimental reasons if nothing else.
Vicky looked around the room at the twenty-four empty chairs grouped at tables of four. Each surface had been freshly wiped down and sanitized, filling the room with a refreshing lemon-scented aroma. She laughed to herself as she wondered just how long the clean surfaces would last before she had to pull out the Clorox wipes again and made a mental note to add some more to the school supply list that she would be handing out to the parents the next morning.
She thought back to the last day of school in May, her last day teaching at her old school. Rumors had been running rampant of budget cuts and even school closures since the last school board meeting. Vicky had heard that several teachers were being laid off, but she figured as a history teacher that her job would be safe. Schools cut out art and music programs all the time, she had told herself, but history? Surely, she had nothing to worry about. Or so she thought until Mr. Carter, the principal of DiMaggio Junior High School gently rapped on the open door of her classroom just after the final bell had rung and her students had left for the summer.
"Miss Larson, could I see you for a moment?" he had asked, beckoning her out into the hallway with his index finger.
"Of course, Mr. Carter!" Vicky got up from her desk and met Mr. Carter at the door. Vince Carter was a tall and slender bald man in his mid-thirties, just like Vicky. This was his first year at DiMaggio and he had quickly earned the moniker "Carter the Cutie" from the female students as well as a few of the younger teachers. Vicky often heard whispers and giggles in the teacher's lounge from her colleagues speculating over whether or not Mr. Carter was single, which Vicky always rolled her eyes at. From twelve-year-old girls it was cute but coming from grown women it was unprofessional and downright embarrassing.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Carter?"
Mr. Carter looked down at his shoes as he responded, making Vicky a little nervous. "Miss Larson, I'm sure you've heard by now that the district is making a lot of changes for the next school year due to some constraints in the budget."
Vicky nodded, anxious for him to get to the point.
"Well, one of the issues being addressed is the lack of staffing in the elementary schools. Several teachers have quit just in the last few weeks."
"So what does that have to do with me?" Vicky asked coldly.
Mr. Carter finally looked up at her with his ocean-blue eyes that every female in the building seemed to go gaga over. "Miss Larson, before I tell you this, I need you to understand that this was a district-level decision, and it has nothing to do with your performance."
"So they're firing me," Vicky guessed. She glanced down at her own feet and bit her bottom lip.
"No, no!" Mr. Carter quickly assured her. He reached out to grab her shoulder, but she pivoted back into the classroom, resting her back against the metal doorframe and crossing her arms over her chest.
"Then what's going on?" she asked with a hint of aggravated impatience.
"As one of the teachers with the lowest seniority in the district, you're being transferred to Frasier Street Elementary School," Mr. Carter explained. "You'll be teaching kindergarten."
And that was that. After three years in her dream job teaching geography and world history, Vicky had been plucked out by the higher-ups and thrown into a kindergarten classroom simply because it was cheaper to shuffle teachers around between schools than to hire somebody new who was actually qualified to teach early childhood education.
She went to her desk, opened the top drawer, and pulled out one of the literacy curriculum guides that the previous teacher had graciously left behind. She thumbed through it for several moments, marking certain pages with post-it notes. When she first accepted this job, Vicky had been overly confident, thinking that there was little more to teaching kindergarten than counting and the alphabet. However, she quickly realized that today's kindergarten curriculum was much more rigorous than that, with its own set of educational standards she had to follow to ensure that each of her students was prepared for state testing at the end of the school year. So she had spent the majority of what was supposed to be her summer vacation putting together lessons for math and reading, with a little bit of age-appropriate history and geography sprinkled in. Five years old was a bit young to begin learning world or even state capitals considering they couldn't even read yet, but Vicky figured that she could at least teach them about where they live and had marked San Francisco on her map with a gold star.
Luckily, Vicky already had all of her lessons planned out for the first week of classes, starting tomorrow with a reading of the Dr. Seuss classic, "Oh, The Places You'll Go." It was a bit of a cliche, but it was one of her favorites from her childhood and one of the things that had excited her most about moving to kindergarten was the opportunity to spread her love of reading to the next generation.
Vicky was so engrossed in the curriculum guide that she barely noticed the knocks on her classroom door. After the third knock, her head finally jerked up and she turned to see Mary Wiltrout standing next to her, laughing.
"Doing some last-minute planning, are we?"
Vicky nodded sheepishly. "I didn't realize teaching kindergarten was so intense," she confessed as she put the book down. "I thought it was going to be all coloring and fingerpainting!"
Mary chuckled as she leaned back against Vicky's desk. "Oh, don't you worry Dear! We don't even start working on the curriculum until the second quarter anyway. We're talking about five-year-olds here. All you'll be doing the first few weeks is teaching them how to stand in line and raise their hands when they want to speak. All of this will fall into place later," she said, gesturing to the curriculum guide. "For right now, the only thing you need to worry about is learning this list of names." She tapped pointedly on the class roster pinned to a clipboard right next to the book. "It may just be a list of names to you right now, but by the end of May, each of these twenty-four little ones will have a special place in your heart." She patted her chest twice on the word "heart" to emphasize her point.
"You really think so?"
Mary nodded. "Oh, yes! I can still tell you the name of every single student from my first kindergarten class over thirty years ago. Your job may be to teach them, but when you've never taught kindergarten before, you end up learning a lot more from them than they do from you. And as a result, you never forget them." Mary's voice caught in her throat a little at the end of her sentence, and Vicky thought she saw a tear forming in her eye.
Mary scanned the class roster searching for any last names that sounded familiar. "Ah, I see you have the youngest Tanner girl," she noticed. "I had her oldest sister DJ, gosh, it must have been almost ten years ago now." She looked up as if she suddenly remembered something. "I can't believe that little baby is old enough to be in kindergarten." She shook her head. "Doesn't feel like it's already been five years since the accident."
Vicky leaned forward in her chair. "What accident?"
Mary pulled one of the kindergartener-sized chairs from the nearest table and took a seat next to Vicky.
"You see, about five years ago a woman was killed in a hit-and-run by a drunk driver. Her husband was a sports reporter on Channel 8 at the time, so it was all over the local news for weeks. She wasn't even thirty and they had three daughters, the youngest of which was just a few months old."
"Oh, that's awful!" Vicky gasped and covered her mouth with her hand.
Mary nodded solemnly. "Those poor little girls' faces were plastered all over the local news stations along with the funeral coverage and then the trial later on."
"So they caught the guy who did it?" Vicky asked hopefully.
"Thankfully, yes. I couldn't bring myself to watch the trial, but I heard that he got about eight years."
"That doesn't seem like nearly enough for what he put that family through!" said Vicky.
"No. It certainly doesn't," Mary agreed. She got up and pushed her chair back into the table. "But that goes back to what I was saying earlier. Each of those names on your list is going to walk into this room tomorrow with their own life story and some of them will have had a much more difficult one than others. We can't change what's happened to them in the past, but what we can do is help prepare them for the future. And I don't just mean academically." She started to leave but paused again in the doorway. "So don't worry about the curriculum," she reiterated, "That's the district's job. Our job is to worry about them. And believe me, you will. Every single night from now until May. Because from the moment they step foot into this classroom tomorrow, they'll be your kids." Mary smiled blissfully as she clutched her hand to her chest. "It's the most rewarding job you'll ever do!"
Once she was alone again, Vicky sat for a while ruminating on Mary's advice. Finally, she closed her curriculum book and put it back into her desk drawer, focusing again on the Dr. Seuss book. Hearing Mary's story about one of her new students had brought a whole new meaning to the book and inspired Vicky to start working on an entirely different plan for her students' first day. She looked around the room again and locked eyes on the one bulletin board that was still empty, which she had planned on using to display students' finished work to show their parents when they came to pick them up. Clutching the book under one arm, she walked over to the supply closet and pulled out several pieces of construction paper. Miraculously, she had all the right colors to match the title on the cover of the book. Vicky sat down to begin cutting out letters and sighed to herself as she glanced at the clock over the classroom door. It was going to be a long night but, Vicky hoped, it would be worth it.
