Oops!

This segment of my long-term sub position has me as advisor for the school newspaper. It's a big job. I have to edit every story, make sure the students make deadline, oversee everything, and most importantly, make sure that nothing goes into the paper that is libelous or represents the school in a bad way. At the end of the day, I get blamed for anything that goes awry.

My first issue went to press two weeks ago. It was our Spring Break issue, so it HAD to be passed out on the Friday before Spring Break in order to be timely. We had a huge center spread on Spring Break, which included a page with statistics about drinking and sex that takes place over Spring Break. This page had some alarming stats, such as:

*3 out of 5 women will have unprotected sex over Spring Break
*97% of college students, legal or not, will drink over Spring Break
*Students drink an average of 20 alcoholic beverages a day over Spring Break
*65% of students have at least one sexual encounter over Spring Break

At the bottom of the page, the page designer needed to fill some space, so she wrote, "Have fun this Spring Break!"

The editors and I stayed after school on the day we had to send it to the printer. We had a lot of work to do, but we were hurrying to get it done so we could all go home. I was editing pages, and the editors were designing layout. We finally felt like we had an almost perfect paper, so off it was sent to the printer. Then the snow hit, and Jeffco shut down school for the next two days. To my dissapointment, that meant that the paper wouldn't be delivered before Spring Break. Oh well, what could I do about it?

We finally returned back to school two days ago. My staff delivered the paper around the school, and I was quite proud of how great it looked. I even had an Assistant Principal come tell me he thought the paper looked great.

Today, I split my staff into two groups, and I took the seniors into another room for a meeting. During this meeting, I had another student come into the room and say, "Miss Nichols, I need to talk to you as soon as possible." I quickly excused myself into the hall to see what she needed.

"What's going on, Nicole? Is everything OK?"
"Umm. You're in trouble. Mrs. Lacy (Assistant Principal) wants to speak to you right away. It's about the paper."
"OK. Do you know what it's about?"
"She said the stats on the center spread are promoting sex and alcohol, and she's pissed. She is searching for you right now."

I'll admit, my heart started pounding, but I still had a class to run, so I continued the meeting with my seniors. I knew that as the teacher, I was the one to blame, so I was ready to take the blame for this one. The bell eventually rang, and rather than wait for Mrs. Lacy to come find me (I was afraid she'd be around every corner searching for me), I decided to go find Mrs. Lacy and get it over with. I didn't want to spend my day on the look out for my scolding.

I tracked down Mrs. Lacy and said, "I hear you wanted to talk to me?"
She laughed. "Well, that's not exactly what I told Nicole, but while you're here, yes, let's talk." Very gently, she proceeded to tell me that she had received a few phone calls from some parents who were upset by the center spread with the stats about sex and alcohol. She said it wasn't the fact that we put those in the paper; it was the fact that we put "Have a fun Spring Break" at the bottom of that page. Some parents took it as if we were promoting those ideas. Of course, we weren't, but you know how some people are. She said Littleton is a very Mormon community, so I just needed to be careful about what we printed in the paper. She said the paper looked great, and she was pleased by what she saw, but I needed to be careful on the next paper.

Problem solved. That was easy. Nicole made it sound like I was in for a lynching, but Mrs. Lacy was very kind. Problem averted. Phew! I'm glad I tracked her down because I would have been sick with worry all day wondering when she was going to find me.