Sneak Peak!

OK Bobcat Blog readers - THIS is why you read the Bobcat Blog! I have been trying to raise the readership of our little blog for over two years! Unconfirmed accounts report that our readership is upwards to 40 people, but we seem to have a hard time of finding 40 people who will actually admit that they are regular readers! I understand the hesitation to admit that you regularly waste valuable time here!
In an attempt to reward you, my faithful readers, who have endured countless grammatical errors, my crazy take on life, stories about my family, and my feeble attempt to humor you through my writing, you are getting a "sneak peak" at something that will be officially announced tomorrow! You deserve this for sticking with me for so long!
If you are like me, and I know many of you are, we are consumed with knowing something BEFORE everyone else does! Why this is such a invigorating dynamic, I can not explain, but I do believe it to be true. We like to be able to say we knew something before our friends!
So without further delay, here is the big news that we are excited to announce!
As you may remember, BBS lost their guidance counselor back in September. At that time we began searching for the right person to join our staff and fill this position. We are excited to announce that Ginny Young will be joining the faculty/staff of Brainerd Baptist School. Ginny has a very distinguished career in both public and independent education in the Chattanooga area. Her previous teaching experience includes 18 years at East Brainerd Elementary, 12 years at St. Nicholas school, and most recently 11 years as Head of School at Hickory Valley Christian. She has worked in guidance capacities at both St. Nicholas and Hickory Valley. Ginny earned her bachelors degree in elementary education from Tennessee Technology University. She also earned her MS in counseling from the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Her experience in independent education will be a great asset to Brainerd Baptist School. Ginny will be coming on board at BBS beginning July 1st.
I am looking forward to working with Ginny and can not wait until our school families can meet and welcome her to the BBS family!

I'll Call You..For Real

Well, it seems as though we are in the time of the year where I have lots of things to write about, and not enough time to write about those things. Let me first apologize to my faithful 31 readers. Rule number one in having a successful blog is giving your readers a reason to come back to your blog OFTEN! I have not done a good job of taking care of my readers. I will try to do better over the next couple of weeks. I have to get my readership numbers up in preparation for the big Census Day, which will be April 1st.
Are you like me? Have you ever been told the title of this post before only to not have that happen? If so, I hope I can take this painful piece of your past and make it up to you!
Over the last couple of weeks, we have had to do something that 1.) I have never had to do before and 2.) I HATE having to do - have an unscheduled early dismissal due to weather. Just to set the record straight, I have no problem calling school when there is a need to cancel, but I really do NOT like being forced to do a dismissal in the middle of the day. The best phrase that I can come up with to describe it is simply a "train wreck"! You always have families that either can not get there in time, or do not get the message that we have dismissed (even though we put it on EVERY news station, radio, Internet, email, etc. etc. etc!). This happened again this past Friday when we had an unexpected early dismissal. Although we dismissed at 1:00pm, it was 2:30 before all students were picked up.
In an effort to help our parents who are not connected to their email, Twitter, Facebook, or website 24-7 via their cell phone, we are now capable of calling all of our school families with urgent announcements. In the future, should we have the need to get crucial information to our families in a hurry, we have the capability to do this. We have set this up to call all of our families cell phones, so if you have recently obtained a new number, and you have not updated that number in the school office, you may want to do this.

Update on Aaron

The last 30 hours have been a whirlwind in the Corcoran house. I know many of you are wondering what exactly is going on, and have asked that on Facebook. This has all happened so fast that we really did not know how to handle it. I emailed some friends and my faculty letting them know what was going on, but decided against posting anything publicly until we knew exactly what the prognosis was. Now that we have a better idea, I will try to explain in more detail for those of you who are wondering!
Yesterday, Katrina took Aaron (my 9 year old son pictured to the left) to his pediatrician. In the last week or so, a large mass had appeared to the left of his Adam's Apple. The Dr. informed us that they needed to do further testing to figure out exactly what the "mass" was. Katrina learned that it's not necessarily a good thing when your Dr. goes and gets another Dr. and they immediately go into conference mode. Once the word "cancer" is muttered, it does not matter what else is said, the mind becomes focused on that word. Needless to say, this sent our heads and hearts spinning. I was at home with the other two children (Andrew & Abigail) and Katrina was relaying this information via text.
The word "cancer" is very close to home in our house. Both Katrina and I have uncles who are battling (or have recently lost a battle) to this disease, and of course, one of our own students is also fighting this disease. We spent most of yesterday afternoon dealing with this news in our own ways and of course wondering what tomorrow (today) would hold. Yesterday afternoon, the Dr. office called us to tell us that they had scheduled a CT scan (with contrast) for Aaron today. Although we believed that this was good news, since we did not want to wait to find out, we also were concerned that the Dr's felt the need to make this happen so quickly! Your mind can really start to play tricks on you.
So we loaded up Aaron and headed to Gunbarrel Rd. around lunch today. I promised him a trip to GiGi's for the cupcake of his choice once the testing was complete. He handled it like a champ. After this the waiting game was on. They told us that it could take up to 48 hours for the Dr. to read the report and call us. Fortunately for us, they called us this afternoon (with a little extra pressure applied by a good friend) and gave us the news that we were wanting to hear. This "mass" appears to be a cyst, not a tumor! Aaron is still facing surgery to remove this and we are praying that the cyst is not wrapped around any nerves or vocal cords. We are scheduled to meet with a E.N.T. specialist later this week and will know more then.
I want to say "Thank You" for all the prayers, FB messages, Twitter messages and emails. We have truly felt the spirit moving on our behalf. Please continue to lift up Aaron and the Dr.'s as they determine the best way to remove this.

The Power of Giving

If you ever need inspiration about intentions of BBS students, look no further than this post. I was reminded today about some of the many things that our student body (under the direction of our student council) has done to serve others throughout this year. Quickly coming to my mind were several things. I will admit that because I am so closely involved in Brainerd Baptist, I tend to forget the power of what our school is accomplishing. I thought I would take some time to highlight some of the things that our students have done so this year. I may forget something, so if one of my 30 readers (I had a parent inform me at our PSO meeting that she is a reader but did not "stand up" to be counted. Doesn't 30 sound soooo much better than 29!) remembers something that I have left out, let me know and I will get it added.

• Winter Coat drive for La Paz Chattanooga - This was one of our first big drives of the year. Our students brought in several boxes of coats for the local organization that serves Spanish speaking people. They were very excited to have our support.
• McKamey Animal Center - The student body (pictured above) brought in various supplies for the McKamey Animal Center. Over $100 was also raised to help support this great organization. A brick will soon be laid on their campus with the school's name on it for their donation.
• Susan G. Komen - Our student body once again raised over $200 for Mrs. Michelle has she went to California to walk in the 3 day fun walk to raise support for this great cause.
• Mattie's Mission & Baby Shafer - In probably our largest undertaking of the year (to date) our student body has raised thousands of dollars to help support these 2 families that mean so much to Brainerd Baptist School. We will continue to do various things as well.
  
• Chattanooga Homeless Coalition - Our most recent endeavor, our student body was encouraged to bring in gloves, socks, scarfs, or coats to help the homeless of Chattanooga.
  
• Ronald McDonald House - A few years back our 2nd grade teachers decided that they would focus on collecting money for RMH the entire year. They have done a great job and will be presenting their collected funds sometime this spring.

These are just the ones that pop in my head. There are also smaller ones that individual classes may do. Isn't this great? I want to brag on our students and teachers for doing such a great job showing the love of Christ that should govern the way we live our lives! Way to go BBS!

Calling Out My 29 Readers

O.K. Bobcat Blog readers...you are on the hook -I need you to flex your collective muscle! This Thursday night at 6pm, we will have our 2nd of 3 yearly PSO meetings. There are 3 items up for discussion that will take up the majority of our meeting. We will be presenting our strategic plan that our school board has recently finished. Our 2nd item for discussion will be the new classroom placement request policy that our parent advisory council has just completed. Finally, we will be going over some of the changes in our upcoming standardized testing. Please make plans now to attend! Childcare is provided and the meeting will take place in the sanctuary.

Snow...or else!

Why is this NEVER easy? "Blizzard 2010" is looming but her timing is not good. Don't get me wrong....I am longing for a good snow. I realize there is considerable thought that I NEVER want to cancel school and that I become the "grouchy headmaster" when it comes to canceling school. This is really not true. I would love nothing more than for a snow storm to come in one evening before I go to bed so I can cancel school and make everyone happy. Is it too much to ask for mother nature to operate on a timely schedule?
They tell us that this storm is apparently going to come tomorrow afternoon. Early dismissal is NEVER pleasant. I would much rather stay all day or not bother coming period! I have decided to do an early dismissal tomorrow and if we go through all this trouble...she (Mother Nature) better reward us with some snow!

For Real???

I realize you are probably straining your eyes to figure out what exactly this is a picture of. I am sure that my wife probably has the capability to reverse this picture and make it look normal with her super-duper photo program, but at this point in the day I do not even have the desire to effort this.
This is a "warning" citation that I received earlier today. You may be wondering what exactly did I do to merit such a piece of paper, and if so, you will enjoy this one.
I live in Dade County, GA and this in itself is a point of contention for me. I would much rather live in the great state of Tennessee, where I was born and lived the first 24 years of my life. I moved to Dade County almost 10 years ago when I was also serving as a youth pastor at a church in Trenton. I did this in addition to teaching, and our house was a happy medium. It was about 15 minutes from Brainerd Baptist and about 10 minutes from the church. We really do like the lot that our house is on, and our neighbors, I just do not like that fact that it is in Georgia. For those of you who think my feelings come from my allegiance to my Vols, I must also admit that both the state income tax and the Ad-volorem tax help heighten the feelings of disdain that I have cultivated through the years, and not simply my hate for those ugly, pesty, Georgia Bulldogs.
Now, back to my story, because I live in Dade County, garbage pick up is not an option. Because of this, I typically load up my truck and make a couple of trips to the dump a week (we produce a lot of trash, and a lot of recyclables!) Since we are leaving for a couple days for Christmas, I decided to take our garbage and recyclables off today. Easy enough. Once I get to the dump, or "Convenience Center" as they like to say. I find out that it is conveniently closed for Christmas Eve. This makes perfect sense to me since every time I go to the dump I see 3 or 4 prisoners dressed in orange Dade County jumpsuits working there. I can only surmise that I falsely assumed that these guys were incarcerated. If not, why else would the "Convenience Center" be closed the day before Christmas. They would not close merely so the prisoners could spend more "quality time" in their cell would they? So now that I have wasted a trip to the dump and am driving home again, I happen to come upon a road block that has been set up since I left my house. As is typical for me lately, I listen to books while driving. As I pulled up to the state trooper, an older, friendly looking man, I politely smiled and said, "May I help you sir?" For the record, let me state that I enjoy the fact that the police will set up at this particular spot just a half mile or so away from my house, so I am more than happy to stop and show my drivers licence and proof of insurance, since I always have these items. They will do this 3-4 times a year, and I have never had any issue.
The first words out of the officer's mouth caught me off guard. He said, "Do you know you are breaking the law?" in a rather smug tone. I said, "um, No Sir I did not" sensing that this was not going to be the "pleasant" exchange that I was preparing for. The officer asked me for my license and proof of insurance and I quickly handed them to him expecting him to smile, hand them back to me, and say "You have a Merry Christmas" and for me to drive off. At this point I would like to think that I do not look like a criminal that they hope to find at these sorts of things. Something strange happened though. He pulled out a little book and went around to the back of my truck and began writing things down. I guess it was a safe assumption that he was not writing down the model of my truck because he was smitten with it's power and beauty! At this point, I realized what was happening and spoke up, probably in a somewhat agitated tone. I said, "Officer, are you giving me a ticket?" He said, "No son, just a warning, but you should know better than to drive with earphones on in your vehicle." I responded rather smugly (I know you can not envision this) "I thought it was safer to use a hands free device when driving sir, and those ear phones are part of my hands free device for my phone." I then pointed to the hands free microphone that is apart of the iPhone headphones. He wasted no time in telling me that "I could only have 1 ear bud in at a time or else I was unsafe because I could not hear sirens and other noise that is necessary to be a safe driver." I couldn't help but feel upset and embarrassed at the same time. It was at this point that the officer noticed that my birthday was tomorrow and decided to make small talk about it, and I was not necessarily in the mood to chat about this. As is always the case, I had to hear about some family member who also has a Christmas birthday (or the 24th or 26th). In this case, it was his mother who also had a birthday Dec. 23rd. So I drove off headed towards my house, which was less than a mile away thinking about the course of events that had just transpired. I came to the conclusion that if I lived in Tennessee, this never would have happened!