Origin Story of the Podcast and Future of the Podcast

Education Matters NY is back! In this episode Wayne Ackles explains his extended hiatus. Wayne also shares the circumstances that led to the creation of the podcast as well as the future of the podcast. 

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Welcome back to education matters, New York. This is your host, Wayne Ackles. And I just wanted to welcome everybody back to the podcast after a longer than expected hiatus, I had planned on being off the air, if you will, or not delivering a podcast here for a few months, and it turned into close to a six months didn't want to do share the reasons for that. And also wanted to share the origin story of the podcast, also the future of the podcast and today's episode. So I'll get right to it, so that we will not burn too much time here for everybody. Save that time for future episodes with all of you. And I hope you're happy to hear back. Had someone recently asked me about the podcast. And that kind of spurred me to pick up the pace and get back at it. And it feels really good to be back here doing this again. So without further ado, a little bit about the hiatus. As many of you know, I've been working as a training coordinator for a local construction company DDS companies, who I now have been with for about a year and a half closing in on actually the two year mark, it's coming up rather quickly, one of the things that I have been, as I've shared on the podcast, or maybe I haven't shared, but I took a little bit of a pay cut when I changed careers, as one would expect when moving from a career and public education to the construction world. So to supplement that, for the last few months, I took up a second job at a local antique store to help supplement with two kids in college and, and different things. So fortunately, my pension has kicked in here and a few short days. And so that will kind of help. Right? Right the ship, if you will, in terms of the finances and things. So I'm pretty excited about that, as you can imagine. And it also takes some other pressures. And one of those pressures was, you know, hanging on with a second job. So that was what really part of the hiatus also a secondary piece to that was also, you know, rethinking and coming up with ideas to revamp the podcast, putting this together. It's not terribly hard work. But it is it does take a certain amount of time between two jobs and you know, just life it was becoming, it was not going to be possible to run that. So the reason for that, with that in mind. Since I just mentioned the revamping and thinking about the podcast, I wanted to share a little bit about what the podcast will look like going forward. So one of the pieces of feedback I've had from a number of people about the podcast is that they really have enjoyed, when we have guests on the most, those seem to be the episodes that really have a lot of downloads, a lot of people really seem to enjoy what that content looks like. So with that in mind, one of the, again, difficult things with this podcast is as being a you know, not only the host, but the producer and you know, chief cook and bottle washer, is that I also have to reach out and get guests, which sounds like a fairly simple job. And generally speaking, people are willing to come on, but it's difficult because people have real life schedules, a lot of times they really want to come on, but it's a question of coming up with timing. So with that in mind, what we're going to do going forward is switch to and instead of a weekly podcast, this will probably be a once or twice a month podcast. And that will give me time to reach out, get guests on the show, if I can't get a guest. Find some other content that hopefully that I can will people will find, you know, entertaining, they want to hear I when people listen to a podcast, they want to be both entertained and informed. And part of my role is to make sure that if I'm going to have a podcast that that's exactly what it does. So with that in mind, I'd rather have a higher quality podcast with fewer times per month that it's out there than trying to just fill that space and there were times where it was getting difficult to do that. And there still are some some solo ideas without a guest that I still have in mind that I think are worth sharing. And I think you'll find entertaining and hopefully informative. But really, the heart and soul of this is really the enter the Well, I think it's the most entertaining ones as well. But are the interviews, I want to be able to do that and do that, give it justice and take it from there. So with that in mind, I'm going to shift gears also move to the origin story of the podcast. So that hopefully people will appreciate and understand the the why I'm doing this. It took me a long time I thought about doing this fairly early into the podcast. And I frankly wasn't ready to do that at that point. And for a lot of the reasons that you'll hear me talk about today, I'm doing this unscripted. So that could be a little dangerous considering that not quite sure where this will take me to. But my goal is not to ramble and meander, but to really be straightforward and let you know the whys and wherefores of how the podcast came to be. So let's get started. As I've mentioned, and during the podcast, probably during one of the first episodes that I retired from education after a 30 year career, the last 14 of which were as an administrator, and the last two of those were at West Genesee schools. And that was, excuse me in the midst of the COVID outbreak. I wanted to establish that timeline a little bit again, just so that there was some context for the origin story. And like any good origin story, whether it's a character in a novel or a superhero comic story, the origins of this podcast, and why I was compelled to, you know, put this together come from that time period. So I want to take us back to the fall of 2020, when the pandemic was still a pretty powerful piece of everybody's life. This would have been right around August, September, going into that school year, and that was the first school year where districts were allowing students to come back in have classes. And there were a lot of different restrictions, you know, the desks were six feet apart, there were masks. This was, again, pre vaccine. And I think that's an important piece to remember, there was still a tremendous amount of fear. And there were also a lot of different advice, or expectations, and all kinds of different thoughts. Also, the elements of the politicization of the pandemic had really started to take off at that point as well, which made things difficult. And we in the school business, we're kind of caught in the middle on a lot of that, and I'm sure I've brought that up before, in fact, I know there was a particular elected official that I called out by name on an earlier episode. So if this is your first time to the podcast, it's worth taking a look at that my little mini rant. But anyway, so it was Labor Day weekend, heading into this first school year. And on that Thursday, I had my faculty meeting and it was it was very an odd experience. faculty meetings were something that I actually really enjoyed. I liked the interaction with the staff, I liked being there with them. Whenever we did staff development type things, or just were able to get together, it really was always something that I looked forward to a great deal. But this was very different. This was zoom. This was a meeting with people in separate rooms on computer screens. And as I mentioned earlier, there was still a lot of fear, there was a lot of trepidation. People were concerned, they weren't sure what it was going to look like to bring back approximately 700 students on any given day to walk the halls of West Genesee so that, you know, we could get back to teaching and learning. And there had been a tremendous amount of work and I know I've mentioned it before, and I want to mention it again. You know, my three principals that were working under me, you know, that I can't imagine doing that with three other people. And you know, there are other folks in my career that I feel similarly about, for different reasons in different circumstances. But I was glad that I had the team that I had with me for a lot of different reasons. But my point is we went into that year is that there was a lot of high stress, high energy, just to make sure we are ready to open. So as we entered that meeting, I was very aware of the trepidation and the fear that my staff had coming into the year and some of that fear had transformed into distrust, as well, not so much with individuals, but just the sense of was this a was this a good plan? Because, again, there was a lot of unknowns, we, the science had been changing, the parameters had been changing. And even though the distrust wasn't necessarily directed at me, and my principals or even the superintendent, there was concern that, you know, was this the best plan, and it was that it was real and palpable, and people told me as much. So that's some of the background going into this meeting. And as we continued to conduct business and field questions, that through the business that we needed to, we finished the faculty meeting, and as it finished, I remembered feeling just off kind of had pounding in my ears. I felt flush, this physically did not feel right. Well, I checked, that I should say, I checked the my head, our nurse, check my blood pressure, and found that it was way off the charts. And that was with medication. I, I've been on medication for blood pressure for quite some time. That was it was partly genetic, partly stress induced, I'm sure. I know that surprising that a school administrator might have blood pressure issues. But the point was, is that my blood pressure was not in a good place, I was not feeling great. And as I talked with the nurse about my symptoms, and the fact that my blood pressure wasn't coming down and reached out to my primary care physician, the short version is that I ended up being taken to the hospital. And to my surprise was admitted to the hospital, which you could have knocked me over with a feather. When they told me that they were going to admit me, I had had similar kind of bouts with my blood pressure before, but not to where this outcome had happened. And I spent an overnight in one of the Syracuse hospitals and got, you know, fantastic care. And while there was no CPR, no, you know that it didn't get to that point. But as I sat there on that Thursday, that elapsed into the Friday before Labor Day, I had decided at that point that come spring, I was going to be doing something different. I didn't know what at that time, I really thought it would be in public education still. But I decided that this was the universe telling me it's time for a change. So it was time to listen to that. So after returning, you know, after the Labor Day weekend, and getting a start back into the school year and getting into a rhythm again, I waited until probably probably close to a month after the incident before I went to see my boss, and you've heard me talk about him. David bills, and he'll come up again in this and he's he was fantastic throughout all of this. And I was very upfront with him. I said, basically what I had just mentioned a few seconds ago, come spring, I said to David, I said come spring, I'm going to be doing something else. I don't know what but you know, not this, because this is clearly a sign that it's time to do something different. You know, David has a wisdom about him when he works with administrators. And he said, Well, you know, let's Let's see how you feel. As you get closer to that. They said, Okay, fair enough, we started going through the year, the year was going pretty well. As well as can be expected, there was a lot. Again, some of the extra stressors we were acting is the an extension of the Public Health Department for Onondaga County, which, again, you've heard me talk about, but that was, again, it was that part of it was manageable. And, and we knew that at some point that would end. And I think that's an important piece to this with. As we get into later steps well, as fate would have it, we had an incident in February, and it was a well publicized incident. And I'm not going to get into the details of it. Because it's, it's difficult, for a lot of reasons, not just for me personally. But there were a number of students that felt very strongly about this. And to dredge up. All of it, again, just would not, it wouldn't serve anyone at this point. And if you care to read about the details, I'll give you enough information where you can kind of dig through them. But in February, heading into the February break, we had a situation on social media, relating to social media posts, and a picture and something called the George Floyd challenge. And you can imagine, just by the sound of that, how awful that was, again, it doesn't take much of an internet search to to see the details. And that really turned not just the school into turmoil, but the district, we really had felt by February, that we'd hit our stride. It wasn't a perfect year by any stretch, but we had remained largely open. Even during some of the spikes, we'd remained open, there were just really one one point that we had to close due to a spike in the cases. In general, we had managed to stay open when other places had closed. And we were pretty proud of that, really, because it was a chance for kids to be together. And again, it wasn't perfect, but it was it was something well, that situation with the social media post really became a lightning rod event that exposed a lot of the fissures that I knew as a principal that existed in the district and that we were consciously working on in the building, we had managed to address the concerns that the initial event had raised. And again, we were making progress. We had redoubled our efforts on the progress we were making around some of the issues that that posed raised about awareness and some of the other concerns that came out of really what the George Floyd incident kind of raised for America as a whole. But as we continue through the year, and we had manage to move forward, and things were beginning to, again, get back into a rhythm. A second post appeared. This was, again, devastating. And it led to other events. And again, without getting into all of the details, it really increased the pressure on a lot of issues related to what the original post had brought up again, I I was starting to have some fairly significant not just my own health, street, physical health concerns, but my mental health had also taken a turn at that point. It was pretty devastating for me the emails and things that people were saying in those emails. And, you know, I had, I was smart enough to stay away from social media. Because, you know, it was the direct emails that people were saying to me were toxic enough. I can't imagine if I had really spent my time looking on social media that would not have been any healthier. Having said that, though, knowing that the people that were sending these emails did not know me. They did not know my history as an educator. They did not know that I had worked as someone that had really, throughout my career had worked to try to address issues like this to make people more compassionate toward each other. There was It was rough when all of this came to a head and I am I met with As David to explain where I was at, because my doctor had looked at my physical and mental health and said, you're done. In so many words, it was really hard to try to explain to someone you've known for the past six years, and you'd worked very closely with just where you were at, I can't even bring myself to fully explain it here. And even in the same way that I coached it with him, let's just say that, again, my mental health had gotten to a pretty bad place, the combination of what it was doing to my physical health, and my mental health, led me to seek treatment when my doctor and my doctor said, you're done, you're out, I finished the year essentially, using sick time and vacation time to speed up what had already been. I had decided, after the first event, I had decided that I was going to retire and start a second career, but I'd planned on finishing the year. But that process had been sped up by this latest round of events and the wear and tear was having on my health. That backdrop, you know, leads to how this podcast came about. So is I reflected on that time after I left? I was it took me a while. And I was just telling a close friend of mine the other day that I was still, it was still probably a year plus later that I was kind of asking, like, what happened? And how did I you know, how did I get to this stage. And the podcast kind of grew out of that in the sense that the, the way that I did not leave under the terms, I did not leave education the way I wanted to leave, I wanted to finish up, make it to at least 32 years, there were there was I felt like I had unfinished business at West Jenny in terms of things that we were starting to do both culturally and you know, if you've listened to the podcast, that school culture is first and foremost, and everything else builds on now. Educationally, there were some unfinished business that we had and lessons learned from the pandemic, I was looking forward to guiding us after we were able to be fully back with everybody in regular classrooms and without masks and everything else that went with that. And it really, that that war at me that really kind of left a raw an empty feeling in me, that led me to think, you know, I started to think about so many positive interactions, I'd had so many people that had done such fantastic work that I respected, and just the joy of working, doing the work, but also working with some of those people, that's all of that led me to the podcast is kind of an open love letter. And I probably have mentioned that open love letter to education, or to public education in previous podcast episodes. But that feeling that there was still unfinished business. And this was a way to address that unfinished business a little bit, hopefully give people a resource that they could turn to and either connect with people that were still in the game, or even those of us that are retired. Again, I would hope that people would feel comfortable if they wanted to reach out to me and I think most would do, but having that resource network available that if you're looking for people that have different connections, and you've heard the different folks on the show that have a variety of connections to different aspects to schooling that I think are worthwhile. So that was a little bit longer winded than I had hoped it would be. But I thought it was worth again sharing the origin story for the podcast. I hope that was an episode that was worthwhile for you. Looking ahead, we'll have some, as I said, we'll have some future guests, and also looking forward to actually diversifying and going to start another prize. A different kind of project here. That is not education related, but it's going to be under the fat Wolverine productions, umbrella, something outside the education sphere that I think people will find enjoyable. And I'll share that as well. So you Thanks for listening. Thanks for tuning in. And hopefully that will continue to have some good shows here going forward and we'll go from there. This has been education matters New York. I'm your host Wayne Ackles. And this is a fat Wolverine productions. Take care and have a great rest of the week.