After spending two years in the classroom, I decided to fill a different role for my third year with BECA. As the Santa Monica administrator, I take care of a lot of the behind-the-scenes work that needs to get done so that teachers can focus on teaching their students, and not have to worry about what’s going on outside their classrooms. My days start out with a 6:00 AM ride into school, but after that, every day can be different.
My day-to-day job is to make sure the school runs smoothly. This looks like making daily phone calls to parents, attending to students in the office for discipline or illness, welcoming visitors to the school, supervising students during recess and lunch, organizing and planning meetings and special events for students and families, and being on call to deal with any general issues that arise during the day. I also spend just about every day in our prepa (kindergarten) classroom acting as an assistant teacher. Some days, after classes are over, I run two after-school activities, Parents’ Club and Science Club, which meet on different days during the week.
In addition to this, I manage the school’s scholarship program, which enables about half of the families to send their children to our bilingual school tuition-free, by allowing parents to complete certain jobs which support the school, like preparing food, cleaning buildings, and maintaining the grounds, instead of paying tuition. So a lot of my job covers managing their work schedules.
Beyond my day-to-day role, I also enjoy offering my perspective when BECA and school leadership make decisions which shape the direction of Santa Monica for the future. These are conversations like construction projects, staffing for future years, other NGOs interested in helping our school, and what BECA’s continued role in the community should be for the future. In this role, I am mostly a middle man trying to represent the desires of parents, teachers, BECA and our local partners, as well as sharing my own ideas, to try to make sure that whatever next steps our leadership decides on, they are carefully thought out and everyone’s voice is heard. All in all, this is a very rewarding job and I would not want to be doing anything else right now.
Check out Mr. Joe’s photo album of his day here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10154191172376461.1073741868.4…
