By Becky Salato, Superintendent, Konocti Unified School District
If you have a friend or family member who works in a public school, you may have heard us refer to the 100 days of May. On the calendar, May looks like just another month, but it is not. May is a hundred days crammed into thirty-one.
If you are a parent, you already know this. Your calendar looks like someone knocked over a box of confetti. Field trips and career fairs. Award nights and spring concerts. Senior trips and prom. State assessments and the final push for good grades. And for those with high school seniors, hovering over all of it is the thing you have been building toward since your child’s first day of kindergarten — graduation.
As superintendent, I have the privilege of watching this season unfold across every school in our district, and I am continually reminded that it is as wonderful as it is exhausting. And I wouldn't trade a single chaotic minute of it.
Here is what May looks like from where I sit. All of our schools are hosting events like open houses, senior walks, music performances, field days, field trips, rallies, and end-of-year awards assemblies. Our theater students are performing Beetlejuice Jr. Some Lower Lake High School students visited the Exploratorium in San Francisco. There’s just so much!
Our counselors are simultaneously celebrating seniors and troubleshooting and talking students down from the very real anxiety that accompanies endings. Our teachers are administering state assessments and somehow finding the emotional reserves to make the day feel meaningful and even joyful. Our principals are managing all of this while personally addressing hundreds of emails a day.
And the students? They can smell summer right around the corner the way dogs know an earthquake is coming before we feel it. They are a little distracted, and who can blame them? We dismiss it as spring fever, but if we are honest, we have it too. We all linger a little longer when we’re outside, faces tilted toward the sun. We stretch our legs during lunch. We feel the pull of open air and unhurried time. We are human, and spring is a beautiful time.
Sometimes, it can all feel so frantic that we forget to pause, take a deep breath, and appreciate simply being alive.
I have watched senior athletes stand in the middle of the gym floor after their last home game, suddenly still, suddenly aware that this particular version of their life is ending. I have watched parents when their students are moving from elementary to middle school or from middle school to high school with bittersweet emotion. We want our children to grow and develop, but to do so, we must say goodbye to their younger selves.
We run ourselves ragged through these weeks. We drink too much coffee and sleep too little and around the third week of May, we wonder whether we will make it to June. And then the last day arrives, and the buses pull away, and the hallways go quiet, and we miss them. We miss the noise and the chaos and the questions and the running in the halls that we spent all year asking them not to do.
So this is my message, to every parent attending an award night, to every teacher grading one more project, to every staff member setting up one more event: be present.
Be present for the ceremony, even when you're tired. Take the photo and then put the phone down and watch with your own eyes. Sit in the bleachers and cheer too loud. Let the moment be as big as it actually is.
The children in our care are only this age once. This spring only happens once. This particular, unrepeatable version of your child will not pass this way again.
It is exhausting. Do it anyway. The kids are worth every bit of it. We will rest this summer. We will breathe and recover and then we will do it all again — gratefully.