Darnell

    Well, with all good (and bad) things in life, all eras come to an end, and I am currently at the end of a big one. A 13 year era in fact. Of course, it doesn't hold a candle to Johnny Carson's 30 year reign as the host of the Tonight Show, but hell, that guy was only working a couple nights a week anyway in his last decade.

   I have been a classroom teacher for an entire 22 years now. Well, if you include my northern California subbing years, it's actually 26 1/2 years, more than half my life. Yet, the subbing years were not an every day thing at first. The consistent 5 days a week gig began when I moved to Las Vegas in August of 2002.

   In that time, I have worked at 3 schools. The first one was Tom Williams Elementary for an 8 year period. It was a good school with a lot of diversity in its student population and boy did I learn a lot of lessons there. The big lesson was to not try to get promoted to a position where I had no competence. Lots of teachers were promoted to a position known as "Title I Specialist"...and their main job was to infiltrate teacher conversations and report anything suspect back to the boss. Other than that, they looked to buy things with title money from the Federal government that eventually were stored and no longer wanted or used, especially technology.

   My second school was also good. It was Gilbert CVT, a magnet school focusing on the arts. If circumstances had been better I could have done well there, but life threw me some monkey wrenches before I even started at Gilbert, and the result was not being prepared for good classroom management and coming into constant conflict with the boss. I lasted precisely a year and a month and a half there.

   And then we come to era number 3: Darnell Elementary. This place has been my home for 13 years and it is a bittersweet departure...sweet with some things and bitter with others. But with any long period at a workplace, that just happens.

   I arrived at Darnell in October of 2011, still shaken from my time at Gilbert, which had just ended a day or so before. I was assigned to 4th grade, a classroom where a long term sub had been teaching for over a month. A lot of people working there were not sure about this new guy at first. Neither were the bosses and they soon decided to get this traumatized guy some help and encouragement, and by the year's end...my 10th one in the Clark County School District...I was feeling much better about myself and more confident in my teaching.

   In the next year, I was put in a different classroom (with windows) and now doing 2nd grade. I was also with a solid team who helped me get on the right track quickly. Later in the year, I was invited to take part in a school play, part of a series actually, that helped kids to learn life skills. I was so eager to get into it that I MEMORIZED my lines, not realizing that it was readers theater and that I could have my script in my hand. I'm not sure if I impressed or scared my colleagues then, but the play served as a good way for all of the staff and kids to know who Mr. Moore was.

   In that same year, my wife thought it would be a good idea for the kids to write letters to the namesake of our school. The day before Christmas break of 2012, my class and I got a visit from Dr. Marshall Darnell and his wife, thanking us for our letters. It was then that I knew that I had found my new happy home. On top of that, our art teacher Frank who led the televised morning announcements, wore black on my 40th birthday and told everyone to bow their heads in respect of my 40th!  I will miss Frank next year dearly!

   The following year, I was asked to move classrooms but stay in the same pod. I would teach second grade in that windowless room for 3 years before being asked if I would move out to the portables. Thatwas a good move because the portables had great and controllable AC! I would teach 2nd for two more years and then first for one year.

   In all this time I became a de facto producer of the life skills plays as well as a co-producer of the televised announcements before the studio shut down in favor of intercom announcements in 2015. As a lot of the school's TVs were breaking down ne by one, this was a good move. The life skills plays were pretty much fizzling out due to staff reluctance to participate and I had to cancel our early 2019 show...that one was a bummer. I also became the intercom announcer in the fall of 2018, a position I'd cherish for the next 5 years. During COVID I recorded announcements and shared them with teachers to play to their class.

   In 2019, I was asked (2 weeks before teachers reported back to work) to take on 5th grade in a class rotation among 3 teachers experiment. I started in the portable, but by October it was clear that the system did not work in the switching of classes so I moved into the 50s pod. It was still a disastrous system, but we stuck by it right up to March 13 before we all went out on COVID. For the 2020-21 school year, I moved into the room 2 doors down that had windows, evne though I would be the sole occupant for the next almost 7 months. When COVID cases got really bad, we all had to teach from home starting in November. We were allowed to come back in by late January if we followed the pandemic protocols.

   In 2023 I went back to first grade by my request for a younger grade. In terms of the kids, it has been a good year, but a lot of factors were in place that made me decide to seek a new school. One of them was a desire to be closer to home and my daughter's high school, since my morning commute was 17 miles this year. Another was the opportunity to finally teach 3rd grade. As for other factors, well, they are not for public eyes.

   In all this time, I had the pleasure of having my daughter Natalie at Darnell for 5 years. She had some really great teachers during that time, her favorite being Mr. Games. Everyone who worked at Darnell got to know her since she was 2 years old and often coming at the end of the day.

   When I first came to Darnell, Mrs Cobb was the principal. She was a warm, friendly boss who accepted me for who the quirky person I was. The assistant principal was Ms. Ivey until 2013, then Dr. Fisher from 2013 to 2015, Mrs. Durham from 2015 to 2019, Mrs. Ivey again from 2019 to 2023, and then Mrs. Cano from 2023 to the present. I would say the assistant principal I had the best relationship with was Ms. Ivey.

   Mrs. Cobb retired in late 2022 (she gave us a week's notice as it was right before Christmas break). An interim boss came in for a month or so while a search commenced. In February, Ms. Gray was our new principal. She was a lot firmer and more direct than Mrs. Cobb...and with our school population of kids and parents, this was an asset. 

   In all of these 13 years, I have met and worked with some good people. Of course, not everyone is a friend, at least outside the school walls. With some I have met for lunch, had drinks at a local bar, did trivia, practiced acting with a local improv group, came to their house for a holiday party, and once even came over just to swim. With most others, I worked with them, and that was it, much like any other workplace.

   I shall walk away form Darnell knowing I spent some good quality time of my life there, and now I look forward to a new adventure.