Acromyical

There's been a flurry of activity around school these day, all because of the upcoming visit by PAIS. You can tell by the capitals that pais isn't a real word, though it is a kind of grape they make wine with in Chile. It's an acronym, one of those omnipresent abbreviations that grace us with their brevity and meaning.

PAIS stands for the Pennsylvania Association of Independent Schools, approximately 1/50 of NAIS, which I won't bother to write out. It's a group that the schools created to help them manage themselves. It wouldn't do for just anyone to open an independent school, call it, say Fantastic Refuge for Amassing Nocturnal Knowledge, and start charging people tuition to come to FRANK the same way our school does, without anyone having any idea whether FRANK has any idea what he's, I'm sorry, it's doing. What PAIS does, is visit schools like FRANK and determine if they're OK (an acronym created during the great satyrical abbreviation fad of the mid 19th century, centered in Boston of all places, which reveled in weird misspellings- OK was short for oll korrect, and supplanted the previously popular, OW, or oll wright. People find this derivation hard to accept and look for other derivations, including the noted Haitian rum-smuggling port, Aux Cayes).

There's an element of mutual, let us say, congratulation about all of this. "Hey, we all come from schools the are OK, and we're here to say that you are OK too as long as you pay your dues." What it amounts to in reality is a lot of self, let us say, reflection prompted by hundreds of questions about what the people in the school community think about what the school is, how well it works, and what are it's plans to make it the bestest possible school. Once you've reflected yourself enough to output 200 pages or so of, let us say, output, you present it to PAIS, after which they come and see if you're telling the truth or a fib (though not a FIB, which is what people from Wisconsin call people from Illinois- the other two letters are for words I don't usually spell out in this space but speak on a fairly regular basis).

Then, for the few weeks before the PAIS-people visit, everybody scrambles around the fix everything that's been unsafe, improper, or simply not nice looking since the last time they visited (normally 5 or 10 years). In our office, that means finally making an actual doorway out of a hole in the wall that was knocked open over the summer to allow people to walk between offices without having to go out into the hallway. The visit is Monday and this job was completed, yes, today. Hopefully the paint smell will have dissipated by then. Other arrangements included getting clocks for the rooms that lacked them, such as the gymnasium, where one can keep track of how many seconds are left in a game, but not how long before you must  leave so you can get home to watch the Downton Abbey that you forgot to DVR.

At my daughter's school, it meant tearing down all the signs that people had posted about lost or stolen property, among other things. You get the idea, pretty up the place for the visitors. And after all this, it looks like Monday's visit will be delayed by a snowstorm. What a SNAFU!