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Modern Marching Band: The Magical, the Mundane, and the Remarkable – Part 1

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Above Audio Recorded Using:

  • Microphone – Sony c-80
  • Interface – AudioSigma MikeHero DSP
  • Hardware – iPad Pro 11″ M4
  • Software – TwistedWave for iOS
  • Additional Software Treatment via MacBook Air M2 13″ – AU HiPass, LoudMax, iZotope RX11 Mouth De-Click, AU GraphicEQ

Recorded in my Home Studio

Last Friday, I worked a high school football game for the second week in a row. That’s no big deal, but for context, consider that, from 2004 to 2018, I did PA announcing for a lot of high school football, including 12 years from 2007-2018 where I was the exclusive voice of all games at a local stadium. Then I left that district and have only done substitute football PA work since. My last game prior to this year was in 2022. Being immersed in the high school football scene for so many years, followed by a respite, followed by back-to-back experiences, elicited some observations that I had not really expected. “Is this post about football?” Not really. High school football is high school football – a mixed bag, depending on the season, the teams, and the time of the season. I’ll post thoughts on high school football some other time, but today we really need to talk about marching bands.

I am, proudly, a band nerd. Started learning saxophone in the summer of 1980, and still play when I can. Also, I could specifically be considered a marching band nerd. Drum Major at my high school for 2 years, followed by 5 years at the University of Texas at Arlington (I took 4.5 years to finish my Bachelor’s degree, so I marched that extra season). I’ve followed Drum Corps International since 1984. I actually got into voiceover primarily through doing PA announcing for marching band contests, and I have been the PA voice of the U.T. Arlington Maverick Marching Band since 1998. The point is, I’ve been in bands, I’ve led bands, I’ve showcased bands, and I’ve watched bands with an educated and experienced set of eyes and ears for 45 years.

“Oh, boy, here comes an old man rant about how silly modern marching band is because of how much it’s changed.” Actually, No. I will admit to having issued old-man-rants in the past about certain elements of marching band and drum corps, but I think my perspective is tempered now by a little more age and a lot more wisdom.

Straight-up honesty…Band is awesome. Marching Band is awesome. (Concert Band is awesome, too, but I’ll detail why in another post some other time.) Marching Band isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is simply incredible. Why? Let’s start from the ground up. (“From the top,” if you will.) Learning to play a musical instrument successfully is, on its face, a magical thing when you think about it. The required physical dexterity demands a level of concentration many people don’t realize. But that concentration eventually becomes second-nature and habitual, to the point that even an amateur player is accomplishing something amazing. The player also learns to read music, decoding all the symbols and terms and changing the sounds they’re making to bring what’s on the page to sonic life. Now put that player in an ensemble, where they have to listen to everyone else, follow the conductor, and match it all up to create a performance.

Sounds cool, right? Great! Now, stand up, move your feet to the beat, then learn a bunch of new step styles to glide across a football field while still playing your instrument. Forward and Backward. Establish control of your body so that your legs can take you one direction while your upper body faces another, maintaining proper posture to allow you to blow through your horn or play your drum(s) accurately. Next, learn to change the direction and position of every part of your body. Oh yeah…you also have to move from Point A to Point B in X number of counts, maintaining awareness of everyone else around you so that, when everyone is positioned properly, it “looks like something” from the stands. (In band terms, it’s called “form.”) And while you’re engaging in all this movement, you’re still playing, AND you’ve memorized all the music. All of it, every note.

Prefer to ditch the playing part and just do visual things on the field? Fantastic! You can join the colorguard. Here’s a flag — you’re going to learn how to hold it in various positions, how to spin it, how to toss it in the air and catch it. Here’s a rifle — same skills but with a different shape and weight. Here’s a bunch of other equipment — more flags, sabers, whatever your instructor can dream up — and you’ll learn to use this stuff, too. We’ll teach you a bunch of movements using this equipment, and you also get to memorize all of it and perform it to the music played.

Now, everyone, we’re also going to learn how to dance. Not dancing like at a club, but actual ballet principles: foot positions, leg positions, general body movement. Instrumentalists will have some choreography mixed in with the marching. Colorguard, you’re going to go even deeper with these skills so that you can jump, spin, and perform even more choreography together. You might literally lift and carry each other around at times. Everyone might also have props on the field that you could stand on, move, step around, change, or march across. You’re also going to do this wearing uniforms and/or costumes, and we might have moments where you change something on your uniform so that the colors on the field look different. Of course, you also have to carry all the stuff you take onto the field back off of it, before the clock expires.

Oh! Before we forget – some of you need to step forward as drum majors, leading and coordinating this on the field. You will help manage our rehearsals, try to inspire and motivate everybody, and conduct all the music at the correct tempo and with the appropriate style. You’ll be the proverbial face of the group, acknowledging the judges and audience, and generally representing what your band stands for. You’ll have some authority, but everybody on the field is also the same age as you, and they are your peers, so walk that line carefully. And be sure to help us keep our energy high when everyone’s wondering if any of this is worth it or is otherwise not on their best behavior.

So, we’re going merge all of these skills to learn roughly 8-11 minutes of music, movement, and choreography, start learning and rehearsing it in the heat of August, then work to perfect it over the next 2 months so that we can perform it by late September or early October. It just might suck at first, but we’ll work on it all to make bad stuff good and the good stuff better. Our goal will be to perfect it by mid-late October and have a chance to compete with it into early November. Did I mention we’re going to do all this work before or after school? Did I also mention that you still have to go to class and maintain your grades?

By the way, every Friday, we go to every football game, and you’ll have to carry all your stuff with you to the game. You might not even go home after school and instead make it a 16-hour (or longer) day. Some of you will help load all the percussion equipment and large instruments on a truck. We’ll go into the stands and cheer for the football team, except for midway through the 2nd quarter, when we’ll head to the end zone to prep for our halftime performance. Hopefully most of the fans stay to watch our performance instead of heading to the restrooms or concession stands. Then it’s back into the stands for the second half. We’ll repeat that process for at least 10 weeks. And in October, we’ll spend time rehearsing every Saturday before we pack up and head out to a contest, where we’ll hope to perform twice. We may also have some other performances on October weeknights.

But wait; that’s not all. We’ll also learn music to play in the stands at football games, plus a different song each week to play for the drill team’s performance. Don’t forget the fight song, alma mater, and national anthem. There may also be additional music to learn as the season goes on. If the football team advances to the playoffs, we might learn a different show just to keep things interesting. And some of you will also still work on longer, more difficult concert music for the stage in addition to everything else.

Sound cool? Trust me, it actually IS. But the whole experience, laid out like this, also sounds incredibly daunting. And…it IS. But it’s worth it, and it really is magical. The sense of accomplishment an individual performer gets as they learn the fundamentals, then apply them, then have a chance to hone them, then perform at a higher and higher level, is astonishing. The sense of camaraderie the entire group can develop as they work through a given season is unbelievable. The sense of belonging students and alumni can establish over several years with a school band program is indescribable. People like to say, “they work as hard as the football team.” If we’re just talking about time commitment and perhaps physical effort, that may be true. But band is fundamentally different from any sport. Athletic success is, for better or worse, measured on the scoreboard for all to see, and student-athletes can become disheartened by a losing season or gratified by a winning one. Marching band has scores at contests, but those can be terribly misleading because there are many more intrinsic rewards embedded in the activity. No one knows the exact sum of effort and determination it took a given ensemble just to get there except the performers themselves. A band could finish last at every contest and still come away feeling like it was a magical season. And it is magical.

Come back tomorrow to read about the mundane and the remarkable.

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The Illusion of Learning: State and Local Assessment

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Above Audio Recorded Using:

  • Microphone – Sennheiser MKH-416
  • Interface – cEntrance PASport VO
  • Hardware – MacBook Air M3 13″
  • Software – TwistedWave
  • Additional Software Treatment — AU HiPass, AUGraphicEQ, LoudMax, iZotope RX11 Mouth De-Click

Recorded in my Home Studio

I admit that I have experienced a fair amount of self-loathing for the role I held in education the last 12 years of my career. The first 19 years, when I was teaching, were the most fulfilling. I got to work with some fantastic students. Even the unremarkable students were teenagers, after all, and I like to think that they all figured things out over time and became contributing members of society. I don’t remember having any students who I thought were actually terrible humans. I had some truly gratifying moments in my teaching years, because instruction – the teacher-student rapport that you build over a semester, a year, or even multiple years in some courses – is the literal backbone of education. To me, it’s sacred. As I moved into campus-level assessment, I actually experienced the best of both worlds. For 5 years, I still got to teach one class per day, plus I had the pleasure of supporting my colleagues as we navigated the nonsense of state & local assessment. And make no mistake: it is largely nonsense. These tests provide an illusion that we’re tracking student learning, but mostly we’re just adding a bunch of extraneous activities that intrude upon actual instruction and slowly drive teachers insane. My focal point on the administrative side of things was simple – my job is to help you keep your sanity.

I maintained that same mentality throughout the final 12 years of my career after I moved 100% into the realm of assessment. Whether we’re talking about the old TAAS or TAKS system, the current STAAR, or whatever TEA concocts in the future, the state assessment system in Texas is basically insane. We’re talking about a system where we give your son or daughter a single test each spring that is longer than anything they’ve encountered in an authentic classroom setting (also longer than nationally accepted standardized tests), from which we intend to measure whether that child has “learned” the content based on our arbitrary scale, and from which we also intend to determine whether that child has made adequate “progress” from the previous grade level. In multiple subjects. Then we’ll do it all again a year from now, even though the curriculum for those courses may be vastly different. Wow, for the system to work, that had better be one incredibly sophisticated set of multiple choice questions.

“Oh, but it’s not all multiple-choice anymore.” Yeah, sure. You can add in the choose-all-that-apply items, drag-and-drop, short and long “constructed response” items, but that doesn’t really make the test comprehensive. Those item types are ultimately window-dressing designed to suppress the notion that a given student has a probability of getting 20-25% correct simply by guessing. Any teacher can tell you a truly sophisticated gauge of student progress would track it class-by-class, if possible, on an authentic level based on the content. Instant, regular, consistent feedback is the most reliable. But fewer, infrequent tests with a greater number of items on each are always less valuable in tracking student learning and facilitating better instruction. Always. Regardless of the item types. While nationally accepted standardized tests, like SAT and ACT, are infrequent and extended, they are intended to capture a snapshot of a given student’s academic readiness for college, and schools consider them as part of a broader picture of the student’s profile because they know the tests aren’t perfect. No university in the world puts all of the proverbial student eggs in the testing basket.

And yet, somehow we do exactly this in the United States from grade 3 through high school. The current system has the federal government requiring states to use high-stakes, flawed assessments to answer the question, “Is our children learning?” Agencies like TEA spend millions consulting with testing firms to create these tests, which are then used for all the purposes already mentioned, and whose results then determine the majority of each campus’ and district’s accountability rating for the year (it will take a series of posts or podcasts to deconstruct what a mess the accountability system in Texas is). Now, I realize that certain statisticians or psychometricians may argue for the validity and reliability of STAAR, but this post isn’t arguing those issues, nor am I exploring the notion that the tests are inherently biased against certain demographic groups. For me, the bottom line is that the system as presently constituted is, on its face, detrimental to students and the teachers attempting to educate them because the very notion of an annual test for children simply cannot be considered the end-all-be-all in determining whether they are learning, whether they are making sufficient academic progress, or whether the campus and its teachers are meeting any practical standard of performance.

Yet here we are. And the fun REALLY begins when district administrators get a hold of some data points, develop an addiction to buzzwords like “data-driven instruction” and “rigor,” and decide they want more, More, MORE in the name of determining whether students are performing throughout the school year. Enter Local Assessment, a veritable obsession for many districts (my last district included) as they embark on a quest for – let’s be honest here – some kind of predictor of their accountability for the current year. Sure, student learning is an objective, but the real goal is the score and letter grade we can trumpet in board meetings, news releases, and social media. And it’s created an entire cottage industry: the “benchmark test” that attempts to imitate STAAR in content, format, and difficulty so that students can literally practice…testing. Not necessarily the skills embedded in the coursework, and certainly not skills that might work across different courses. Nope. Testing practice. Texas law currently limits districts from administering more than two benchmark tests in a given school year. (And, voila!, TEA developed their own “Interim Assessments” – two per year – whose sole purpose is to predict a student’s STAAR performance for the year. More on that sham another time.) But hey, that’s OK – your local school district will simply purchase and/or develop a series of smaller tests and call them something besides “benchmarks” – curriculum assessments (CAs), curriculum-based assessments (CBAs), quarterly assessments (QAs), insert your own title and initials here – these tests are all specifically designed to circumvent Texas law on benchmark testing. Sometimes these tests are actually quite short; other times they may require “shutdown testing,” as my last district called it, so a good portion of an instructional day (or maybe all of it depending on what class you teach) is burned away. Short or long, this testing is administered outside the normal testing that occurs in a classroom, meaning that instructional time is interrupted simply for the sake of district-level testing and data. Teachers and students become pawns for the central office bean-counters.

“That should be acceptable if the data is used to inform teachers about student performance and improve instruction.” Absolutely! As the great Kenan Thompson once said, “I mean…it should be.” And sometimes, it happens. SOMETIMES. When I worked under Dr. Teresa Stegall (see last week’s post), we operated under a mantra where “assessment should inform instruction.” But too often, the data is altogether ignored at the campus level, or worse, it’s used in a punitive fashion. Teachers are punished because of their students’ performance. Principals are called into meetings with lofty names like “Cadence of Accountability,” where they have to present their data on the most recent CBAs, defend their numbers, and lay out a plan of action if those numbers fall below expectations. Often, such meetings are incredibly adversarial, where central administrators are almost hostile toward campus principals. I know this because I used to support these principals as an assessment & accountability coordinator, either preparing them for an upcoming meeting or assisting them in the aftermath. The stories could be brutal and actually changed my perception of certain central administrators. The process often seemed like the old joke about “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” No productive or supportive environment, but plenty of accusations and ridicule to go around.

Do you really think, after suffering through such adversarial garbage, principals then go back to their teachers full of energy and support? Maybe the most noble ones do. But more likely, the message and tone received from central office is passed to teachers through badgering and negativity. Then we wonder why morale is down and teachers look to escape to other districts, or out of the profession entirely. But do we ever consider that “maybe this isn’t working?” Heck, no. “It’s what we’ve always done.” (At least for the past two decades.) This is the cycle that high-stakes assessment has begotten. And even as TEA, or the legislature, or the federal government, promise reforms and simplification, what I like to call the “testing industrial complex” (shout-out to the great President Eisenhower) continues to churn and roll along. And no one will have the actual courage to step up and admit that it’s harmful to students, that more and more testing literally crowds out time for teacher-student rapport, for teacher-teacher collaboration, for…you know, instruction. The politicians at the national, state, and local level would rather point to incremental gains that might be illusory and call them “miracles.” And the companies profiting from the system will be happy with that.

This whole sham lies at the core of whatever self-loathing I’ve experienced for the past dozen years. Yes, I tried to rise above the fray. I used hash tags like #respectinstructionaltime when communicating with teachers. I intentionally used humor to establish rapport with staff, letting them know that, as a so-called assessment professional, I understand how the proverbial “necessary evil” of testing was soul-crushing for them because it was sucking away time from the literal reasons they got into the profession. I even got into minor trouble at times for my humor (yet another story for another time), but I make no apologies, because my job was to help teachers, or principals, or fellow administrators, maintain their sanity. I stick by that. But I also stick by the belief that someone in a position of true authority needs the courage to stop this insanity. In the meantime, I ultimately decided that the grind was a bit too much, and not worth having it crowd out the time I wanted for other things in my life. No apologies there, either. And no apologies for using my voice to call out the system as the illusion that it is now that I am no longer constrained by it.

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No Loyalty, No Problem

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Above Audio Recorded Using:

  • Microphone – Roswell Pro Audio Mini K87 High Output
  • Interface – Audient iD4 mkii
  • Hardware – MacBook Air M3 13″
  • Software – TwistedWave for iOS
  • Additional Software Treatment – AU HiPass, LoudMax, iZotope RX11 Mouth De-Click

Recorded in my Home Studio

Let me begin this post with what might sound like a controversial opinion: K-12 public education is just a job. Yes, it can be a deeply fulfilling one because of the lives an educator can impact. But it is not a vocation. It is not a calling. It is not, as a speaker at a conference I attended several years ago said, “driven by a sense of service and altruism.” At least, it shouldn’t be. You may feel called to teach, as a general principle, or to work with a specific age group or type of student, but you were not called specifically to K-12 public education. You were called to instruct, to unlock young minds, to impart knowledge and wisdom – but not to this specific profession or area. It’s simply where you get to practice your craft for an undervalued level of compensation. One of the best pieces of professional advice I ever received: “Just remember, there’s no loyalty in this business.” One of my friends, a teacher and tennis coach, imparted this bit of wisdom when we were colleagues during my first high school gig many years ago.

I don’t remember his exact words, but the general theme of that conversation was this: You are replaceable. They may praise you and call you valuable, but things can turn immediately. They decide they want you out for some reason, or they want someone else in your position, and you’ll find yourself moving on, like it or not. Years later, this person found himself honored by the district in its athletic hall of honor for his work as a coach. He graciously accepted the gesture, but I imagine he still remembered occasions when he may have felt unappreciated. Perhaps time has softened those memories; I don’t know. What I do know is 1) he was absolutely right, and 2) there’s really nothing wrong with a lack of loyalty.

Why do we value professional loyalty in the first place? My theory is that society was conditioned for this during the 20th century: Study hard, sign on with an employer, work hard, and you may well be with that same employer for your entire career. You’ll receive promotions and move up in the company until you reach whatever plateau is your professional destiny. Maybe they’ll relocate you at times, but you’ll be a “company man” (or woman) because you’ve worked so hard and given so much for them, and they reciprocate. The dynamics of job growth and changes occurred within the relatively safe cocoon of a single, long-term employer.

Historically, we view public schools in the same way. Look around at the local elementary schools around you. It’s likely that many of them are named for so-called “pillars” of the district — people who served the local community in the same place, albeit possibly in different roles, over decades, and the district named a campus after this person. We like to reward long-time educators who are our best. We also make it difficult to remove any educator who is mediocre or even bad. Once a given teacher has 3 years of experience, it’s incredibly difficult to fire them —districts have to document problems clearly, set up growth plans, and create a path for dismissal over time to remove a teacher. For administrators, there’s more performance incentive and less protection; they work on a year-by-year basis, so the path to removal is much easier for principals and other admin if they underperform. 

But it’s not the 20th century anymore. Careers in general experience more change over less time. Whichever path an educator chooses, there’s always an exit ramp, and in the 21st century, that ramp is used more frequently. My take on things is that there is nothing wrong with this lack of loyalty, particularly on the part of the educator. Are there situations where a teacher may be “unfairly targeted” by a principal who documents every little thing and makes his/her life miserable for a few years in an effort toward removal? Absolutely. Are these situations rampant? Absolutely not. In my experience, administrators don’t have the time to target anyone capriciously. If you’re a teacher on a growth plan, you’re somewhere between mediocre and a full-on problem, and they’re ready, even desperate, to move on from you.

At the administrative level, things honestly get even crazier. Fact: Anyone with “Superintendent” in his/her title, whether as an Assistant, Associate, Deputy, or the head honcho, is as much a politician as an educator. Lots of other central administrators also have political realities embedded in the job. Politics are fickle; the politics of K-12 public education, even more so. Even the most committed, well-meaning educator moving to upper administration could be unfairly affected by the political shifts in a district. It is cruel, but it is reality. And the best administrators I’ve ever known were all deftly able to navigate the political waters while still maintaining a focus on making educationally sound decisions in their work. It is not any easy balance to achieve.

Fact #2: This proverbial street (Loyalty Lane is a terrible pun, but it works) goes both ways. If you’re a teacher, of course you should care about your students and do your best to serve them. That’s the job. But at the end of the day, week, month, six weeks, semester, or year, you owe them nothing. Your personal loyalty is to the important people in your life – spouse, family, friends, etc. That’s it. If your campus or district is moving in a direction you cannot abide, make no apologies for seeking opportunity elsewhere. If another opportunity arises unexpectedly, do what is best for you and your family. Even if it’s best to leave the profession and you have that chance, take it. No apologies.

What if you’re an administrator? In the “era of accountability,” where your job performance may be dictated and judged by a (stupid) A-F letter grade in a politicized, oversimplified system that is changed every 5 years by law, you have minimal incentive to stay where you are and “fight the good fight” for a campus, district, or community. The politics of educational administration basically require you to preach all the latest buzzwords to teachers, parents, and community alike — about being a “servant leader,” about climate and culture, about academic rigor, about parent and community engagement, about school improvement. Something new will always come along. Preach those words as needed. Heck, believe them, and do your best to fulfill those lofty concepts. But make no apologies for also leveraging those terms and concepts to your next promotion. Your loyalty is to the most important people in your life, not to a campus or district. Beyond doing your best in the here-and-now of your job, you owe them nothing. Maybe you’re content with where you are, and they’re happy with you, but things can turn in what feels like an instant. You could be blindsided and suddenly feel like you’re being forced out.

“Gosh, what a sad perspective on the system.” I am keenly aware of this, but it is a perspective on the system, not the profession. As a naive college student who wanted to teach because he was interested in the learning process itself and in helping students grasp abstract themes and concepts in social studies, I had an idealized view because I did, indeed, view teaching as my true calling. (In many ways, I still do.) I saw myself in the classroom for 30+ years, possibly in the same campus. Then I met with reality, and it was…nuanced. I was moved among different subjects and campuses against my preferences. I dutifully adapted to the changes because that was the job. I also received promises that were ultimately not kept. I dealt with those the best I could. I ultimately learned that I was a proverbial cog in the system, serving the needs of the campus or district when it suited those in control. But I also learned that my calling to teach was simply something that overlapped with the K-12 public education system, though not always 100%. And I learned to take control of my own destiny within that system – switching campuses by choice, going after a promotion, eventually switching districts (twice), and finally, retiring on my own terms. My loyalty remained to myself and my family, and I did what was best for us. Things didn’t always go as planned, and it was never perfect. But I am satisfied with where I am at this moment. At my core, I remain a teacher, but where and how I teach is my choice now. And the 21st century affords me opportunities that are not confined to a bureaucratic system. K-12 public education was my career for 31 years. But in the end, it was just a job.

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Some Funny Things Happened on the Road to Retirement

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Above Audio Recorded Using:

  • Microphone – Rode Video MicroGo II (USB-C)
  • Hardware – iPad Pro 11″ M4
  • Software – TwistedWave for iOS
  • Additional Software Treatment via MacBook Air M3 13″ – AU HiPass, LoudMax, iZotope RX11 Mouth De-Click

Recorded in my Home Studio

It truly is about time I retired from public education. I’ve actually been planning this for several years now. I came across an old unpublished blog post from January 2021 in which I triumphantly stated that 2021 was “what I intend to be my last year as an educator.” 2021.

The 2020-21 school year was my 27th year in education, when I hit the “magic number” for retirement in Texas: Age + Years of Service = 80. On August 7, 2021, I turned 53 years old, so from that day onward, I was officially eligible to exit my career. But 20-21 was also only Year 1 in my final district, and you might recall that it was also the school year right after the COVID pandemic. What a strange year – our district began the year with 100% distance learning, then later allowed students who wished to pursue in-person instruction, but only with social distancing. Testing procedures were really odd – students could either choose to test or defer until later – but I learned a lot in that unique environment. By August 7 of 2021, I don’t think I was actually ready to retire, after all, so I committed to Year 2 at that campus and in that district. I did truly enjoy the campus where I worked immensely, learn many new skills, had made new friends, and was able to find fulfillment in my work as the Campus Testing Coordinator. So I pressed on…2021-22, 2022-23, then 2023-24.

Each of those next 3 school years grew progressively more difficult, though. The district kept adding tests and testing responsibilities while simultaneously gaslighting everyone with a message of “we’re actually doing less than in years past.” Right. I suppose, as George Costanza said, “it’s not a lie if you believe it.” The State of Texas was also adding new things at least every odd-numbered year. And I was burning out while yearning for more time to do voiceover work, worrying that I might miss a critical chance, if only from the opportunity cost of time spent with education and not VO. So in June 2024, I actually filed the paperwork. Sent a paper copy off via USPS Certified Mail – I still have the receipt. I informed my principal, who was herself moving onto a revised life and career in New Mexico. Also informed the staff. The timing actually seemed perfect – 30 years, weary, new principal, new superintendent – let’s make a break for it.

Into my office walks a former principal of mine from a previous campus, now a district administrator. “I want you to reconsider,” she says. We talk about the bureaucratic issues within the district, as well as my salary, and she pledges to work on a pay raise for me. I figure if she can make something happen with my pay that is worthwhile, I might dig deep and muster up another 3-5 years of effort. So I cancelled my retirement in anticipation of her delivering. She didn’t. Or, to put it more accurately, she couldn’t. With a new superintendent, she found herself professionally pidgeon-holed (districts like to call it “reassigned”) and therefore had very little leverage to influence my pay, at least to the level I hoped. I received a raise beyond the typical x% given to all employees, but it was nowhere near what I had requested or felt like I deserved, given the scope and quality of work I was doing for the campus. “But you’ll like working with [new principal],” I was told in an effort toward consolation.

And I did. Great guy, hard worker, dedicated. Trouble is, he found himself just trying to stay afloat amidst even more district bureaucratic nonsense. Everyone at our campus did. It became comical, and we joked about it openly. I joked freely about these things in e-mails to campus staff. And of course, that got me in a little hot water. “You sound like you’re pitting the campus against the district,” I was told by a central office administrator. No, the district is destroying our morale, and I’m trying to show empathy with our teachers through humor. (But that’s another story for a later post.)

So after year 31, in the spring of 2025, I filed the paperwork again, this time electronically. Then a central admin position came open in another nearby district – “Director of Assessment & Accountability.” Way back in 2018, this was where I was headed in my first district before the rug was yanked out from under me (Another story for still another post.) I apply. I contact this district’s superintendent, also a former principal of mine. (No, I am NOT above leveraging old professional relationships, and neither should you be.) I get an interview. Probably the best performance I ever had in an interview. The committee lead calls and tells me it was a great interview, the committee was very impressed, and he needs to contact my references next.

Now you might be thinking, “What about voiceover? What about THE DREAM?!? Weren’t you ready to commit full-time?” Yes, but this central office job would’ve been a substantial pay increase and set me up for an even more lucrative retirement situation in just a few years. I owe it to myself to try, at least. And if this job is meant to be, I can cancel my retirement again and stick it out a little longer. And a week after the interview, it’s looking like that shall be the plan. They seem to want to hire me. Then another week goes by. And another. And finally, I get the e-mail saying “we have decided to move forward with another candidate for this role.” I figure it’s probably the guy with an Ed.D.; districts love doctorates among central administrators. (Yet another future post.)

“Oh, no! I’m so sorry.” Please don’t feel sorry for me – no condolences, no regrets. I applied, I put in appropriate effort and performed well, but that other district went a different direction. I like to think they’ll regret not hiring me, but it doesn’t matter. In the end, I know from experience that central office work is just a little soul-crushing (wow, that’s FOUR future posts), so that potential additional pay would’ve likely come with…suffering. And now, I simply have to hustle as a freelance VO talent, keep building my skills, market and find clients, and do the work. If I do it right, I may be able to cover the potential difference in salary from that job, and then some. And because I enjoy VO, there won’t be any soul-crushing or suffering. It truly is about time I retired from public education.