It's Saturday. The building is mostly empty. Somewhere in Imperial County, a district director is carrying lunch trays and taking out trash that nobody assigned to her.
Esmeralda Garcia has been doing that for 11 years. Then, she was a new counselor who picked up an after-school shift because somebody told her that's where the real connection happens. She stayed. Calexico Unified now has her running expanded learning across the whole district.
"It's pushing through those incremental steps to implementation," she says of what keeps the whole thing standing.
Her staff stayed because they watched her do it. Same rules apply to 30 seventh graders, on a much tighter clock, usually while you're covering somebody else's lunch duty.
Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: How to launch a school year that holds
Reading Rainbow: Dolly, Huck Finn and a $17B invoice
From Our Desk: A better way to grade
Watch of the Week: Paw Patrol, but make it geology
Would You Rather: Pick your September nightmare
How to launch a school year that holds
The first three weeks set the terms for the other 33. Every teacher knows this, and almost nobody gets to plan around it, because those same three weeks are when the copier dies and somebody hands you a new student on a Thursday afternoon.
Esmeralda Garcia built her program the way she described it, one incremental step at a time. Her four moves shrink to a single room without losing anything.
Try this: Open the year with one thing students get to build or pick.
Skip this: The expectations slideshow, which nobody has ever read past slide four.
Try this: Write down what your six hardest-to-reach students are each missing.
Skip this: Planning for the average student, who does not attend your school.
Try this: Point at real progress in October, out loud, by name.
Skip this: Letting report cards be the first evidence the class is worth showing up for.
Try this: Do the messy part of the assignment at a table with them.
Skip this: Running the room from the front like a control tower.
None of that needs funding or a signature from anyone downtown.
"Once they see the magic that we make happen, I mean, once you drink the punch, you can't really go back, right?" Esmeralda says.
She's talking about teachers she recruits. Students run on identical wiring, and our full playbook has the rest, including the student who tracked her down years later to say “thank you.”
Meta buys its way out of study hall: Meta settled with a coalition of state attorneys general for up to $17 billion and agreed to a two-hour default daily limit for users under 18 plus paused notifications during the school day. Seventeen billion dollars to build the feature you invented years ago with a shoebox and a Sharpie.
Huck Finn will not leave the syllabus: The NYT sat with the teachers still assigning Huckleberry Finn and the students working through him, despite racial slurs appearing more than 200 times throughout the book. The Twain novel has now survived 140 years of review committees and one guy at every board meeting who has clearly not read it.
Your $200 classroom budget, itemized: The median supply budget handed to a teacher is $200, and 97% said that isn't enough. The other 3% have located the district's secret tissue reserve and are refusing to share coordinates.
RIP Dolly Parton, the Book Lady: Dolly Parton died last month in Nashville at 80. The Imagination Library she founded mails more than 3 million books a month to kids from birth to age 5. She started it because her father never learned to read. Pour one out for anyone who owns a copy of "Coat of Many Colors.”
Listen to the kids! Students explain what makes classes great: Kid reporters got the mic for this one, and their verdict was that the best classes are the ones where students are invested, built with friendly competition, prizes and hands-on work they drive themselves. Consultants charge districts real money for that same finding.
The hardest ten minutes of your week: A guide to handling a student whose day has gone sideways without it turning into a standoff. Bookmark it in September, because by February you'll be hunting for it one-handed while a laminator preheats and something behind you starts smoking.
Our VP of Partner Success + Ops, Dylan, perfectly describes the start of the term here.
Here’s how to kick off the school year with a smarter grading system.
We’re on the move! Email [email protected] if you want to connect at the below:
Sept 11: Napa Appreciation Event (CA)
Sept 18: Temecula Appreciation Event (CA)
Sept 24-25: Texas Leaders Round Up Event
Our pick of the week: PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie
Why We’re Obsessed: The pups crash on an uncharted island full of dinosaurs, meet a stranded dino expert named Rex and then Mayor Humdinger starts mining the place for resources and wakes up a dormant volcano. Bill Nye and Snoop Dogg are both in the voice cast, which is either a fever dream or the best 88 minutes of your sub plan.
Recommended lesson integration:
How we know dinosaurs existed: Bury plastic dinos in a sand bin, hand out paintbrushes and let them excavate. Rex spent years becoming the island's fossil expert. Your kids get 12 minutes and will still be litigating who found the femur in June.
What actually makes a volcano erupt: Magma, pressure and time. Yes, you have to do the baking soda one. There is no legal exit from that obligation once children have seen the film.
Extinction and endangered species: The whole plot is a rescue mission for animals about to blink out permanently. The real version has fewer talking dogs and a much worse ending, which they should probably find out from you first.
Who gets to dig where: Humdinger mines an island he doesn't own with a permit he never filed. Cover land use, then break the news that in real life he'd be stopped by a Tuesday night meeting that runs three hours past its agenda while a man named Gary reads a prepared statement.
Building stakes in storytelling: Track how the writers crank the danger scene by scene, then have students plot a rescue where every single choice makes things worse. Grading these beats grading anything else this quarter, a bar the movie clears while horizontal.
The cost of digging things up: Debate resource mining against ecosystem damage using the film as the world's most cartoonish case study. Then put a real mining dispute on the screen and watch the room go completely silent. Students will find the real examples significantly less cute.
Pick your poison for the rest of the semester:
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