Level 2!

It took me, hmmm, 7 years of working in public school to finally get my level 2 license, but I got it. No more having to renew every 3 years, now I have 5 years to build up enough credits for renewal. Who knows if I will be working full time in 5 years...or if I will be working on a masters degree and have plenty of credits. But the important thing right now is that I have time to decide. Another important fact is that I am still qualified to keep my job, in case none of these jobs Werty is applying to work out. We can still have a roof over our heads, and that's a good thing.

I was a little late getting the process started on upgrading my license. Disclaimer: the following you are about to read is a whole bunch of excuses. See, there are fees involved. Fees for the background check, fees for the upgrade, they pretty much ding you at each step. And when you are buying a house, and trying to not spend ANYTHING or put ANYTHING on a credit card because you want the nice bank to give you a happy mortgage loan, paying a bunch of fees gets put on the back burner. Then you move, but the printer isn't connected yet, and then the printer seems to be damaged from the move and makes a horrible sound instead of doing what it's supposed to, and Werty and his OCD self doesn't want you to use your computer and printer at work to pay the fees because that connection is tracked by the district office, and therefore not really secure. (See, you can't just pay the fees, you have to print out a receipt and take it to the fingerprinting place - which is our district - and there are lots of warnings that you can only print it when you pay, and you will have to pay again if you mess up or wait too long to get fingerprinted. Blah, blah, blah, excuses to get frustrated and procrastinate.) Then it's the end of the year, there's the testing, the seniors, the NHS stuff, my co-workers are leaving so we have to clean out classrooms and closets, and crud, I still haven't done it.

Here's how it went down: Attempt #1 The district office only does fingerprinting during certain days and hours, but when I arrived, they weren't open during those hours the last week of school. Attempt #2 I got fingerprinted, and the deadline was still a month away, so the two weeks it takes for the background check is close, but okay. Attempt #3 The deadline was now two weeks away, and I was getting nervous. I got an email telling me there was a problem with my background check - some of the fingerprinting data was missing or corrupted, so I need to be fingerprinted again. Within the hour, I was back at the district getting fingerprinted a second time. 3 days before the deadline, I get notification that I have cleared my background check, but the state still says there is a problem and I can't proceed. I called up the state office and asked. Oh, there is a form that has to be filled out by your district. Would this be the form and recommendation that I specifically asked my supervising administrator about over a month ago when I was having my final observation and interview and was told no, there was no such form? I drive down to the district to find out...yes, there is such a form, and yes, I need it signed by both the district and my principal... (Too bad, we just got a new principal that I haven't met yet...) and the secretary who knows where the forms are had just left on an errand. And then suddenly, the heavens parted and my prayers were answered. The district person in charge of professional development is a wonderful, kind-hearted man. He said, 'Let me see if I have a copy of the file on my computer' and then he printed the form for me. Since he knew that my upgrade has be posted by end of business day the next day, he said he would sign my form for me so that I didn't have to try to track down my old principal. (Once the secretary came back and put my information from the form into the state server, I was good to go. I waited a few hours, and hallelujah, the system let me in. I completed the paperwork, paid another fee and I was done! I felt like I was in a Christine Lavin song - and the guy with the bow tie had just paid for my groceries. Five years from now, I hope I will not procrastinate again.