Brenneman's World

A New School Year

The world has been in upheaval for quite a few months now since the banks started to tremble and fall so I guess it's normal for a small boarding high school to feel the shocks, too.

The real campus shocks started in June with the resignation of the president / high school principal. Next came the leave-taking of the chairman of the board. Then - more recently - the vice-president for operations, decided to leave in December. Among all these interesting events has been the slow departure of the business manager / treasurer who is ready for full and complete retirement. With all the changes, about twenty high school students are enrolled, down from about 45 the previous year. About half of these are children of staff members working for the place.

The lawsuit against the school by the U.S. Department of Labor claiming that the school wasn't a school but a money-making scam is continuing. The U.S. district court judge who originally tried the case frankly told the esteemed and thoroughly unhonorable department that it hadn't read its dictionaries too well. The school was, well, a school. But the department thought it had a terrific case that there was a cache of gold buried under the high school classroom building from working (not training) all those high school students so it elected to take the case to an appeals court.

So now what? To begin with, the institution does have a new head, a 1985 graduate who has been running a construction business for years. He's been picking up the pieces and trying to make some sense of the way the place has operated. To help him, he has two former presidents and one former board chairman (only two people, not three) living on the property he can consult. The high school section of the program has an acting assistant principal actually running the show while the acting principal works at his regular job at an accreditating agency and comes in now and then.

Unbelievably, things are knitting themselves back together - at least to human eyes. But it's really the Lord at work. Without Him, the past three months would have been the complete and total end of the place!

Labels: upheaval

posted by James @ 8:48 PM