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Happy new year
LOOKING AHEAD: As the year kicks off, one veteran principal knows there's life beyond a career in academics.
By RODNEY THRASH
Published July 31, 2006
The volunteers at Pine View Elementary stand in an assembly line, concentrating on the neat stacks of lime, electric blue, purple and orange handouts in front of them. They already know their marching orders: Collate. Stack. Stuff. Repeat. Monica Joiner, Pine View's principal, knows the drill better than anyone. She has been doing this the longest. "Nineteen years," she says. A new school year starts here next week, and it will be Mrs. Joiner's last. She looks like a principal. Her attire - a black blouse with white stripes, dark slacks and leather loafers - is impeccable, even on a withering summer day. Everyone else wears T-shirts and shorts. She wears eyeglasses, the ones with gold rims. She speaks softly, but with a firmness no first-grader could ignore. Growing up in Tampa, she didn't dream of becoming a teacher, let alone a school administrator. "To be perfectly honest with you," she says, "I wanted to be in some branch of the service." Marriage, a baby and a divorce forced her to take another path three and a half decades ago. She's spent all those years working for the Pasco County School District - first as a teacher, then a principal. Her son, a kid when she started in the classroom, is now 40. She remarried and became a widow; a brain aneurysm took her second husband. More and more, she sees children of former students walking through Pine View's doors. At 58, she's ready to retire. "Everybody knows when they are ready," Mrs. Joiner says. She'll miss the kids, of course. But she's ready to wake up whenever she feels like it. She wants to take monthlong trips to Greece. She longs to spend her days disappearing inside one of Nora Roberts' romantic suspense novels. But first, she has to stand in the assembly line and help stuff folders with those colorful school calendars and student handbooks, emergency information cards and PTA sign-up sheets. She hopes the work is not in vain, that parents actually read the material she and the volunteers spent hours preparing. Mrs. Joiner and the volunteers pass the time getting lost in traditional back-to-school chatter about cruises, trips to New York, shopping. "Did everyone have a good summer?" one woman asks. "No," says the principal. "Mrs. Joiner!" says the other woman, aghast. "I've been busy," Mrs. Joiner explains. Her days, and the days of everyone else at Pine View, are about to get even busier. The countdown to the first day of school has begun. Rodney Thrash can be reached at 727 893-8352 or rthrash@sptimes.com.
[Last modified July 31, 2006, 18:52:56]
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