When that interview was over, I felt as if I had been run over by a train. I was so mentally exhausted from the barrage of questions I could’ve easily just crawled into my car and fallen asleep. I thought I had handled myself well and as I left the room was told that after checking with my references, they would be in contact with me, one way or another, “in a few days.”
Unfortunately, those few days took a lot longer than expected. About seven days after my interview, my phone rang at my home. On the other end was a person who I had worked with for a short time at Ellis Tech years ago and who had moved on to an administrative position in a nearby school system. After he introduced himself, he asked if I knew a person by the name of Cheryl Veilleux, who, at that time was the principal of Griswold High School. He went on to say that she had just contacted him regarding my application to Griswold and wanted to know if he knew of any reason that I might not be a good fit for her school.
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For one, my initial gut-feeling that they weren’t really sure that I could handle a public school teaching position after coming from a Tech School was absolutely correct. While they would tell me that they became satisfied with my background and abilities rather quickly, the fact that they even considered that aspect both surprised me as well as annoyed me somewhat. By that point in my teaching career, I had been in a classroom for over twenty years and was fairly confident that I could handle just about anything that arose in any classroom in any school system. But, once again, the viewpoint of some people who believed that teachers in a Tech School classroom weren’t as proficient or as adequately prepared as teachers from a public school, just reminded me of that “second class” image that was still out there about Tech