Sale note: SKYLIGHTS is currently at the highest sales rank it’s seen since the day it was released.  I’d still love to see it crack into the top 10K, though; none of my books have ever gone that high on paid sales ranks.  It’s still 99 cents until late tomorrow, but buying now helps more with rankings.  Pleeeeease?

I promise I won’t mention it again until tomorrow unless something awesome happens. 🙂

(Seriously 45 minutes later, as life intervenes)

Today was Count Day in Indiana, or technically yesterday was; the widespread school closings across the northern part of the state meant that we had to postpone everything until today.  Count Day is more complicated than it ought to be; we basically just make sure that we’ve accounted for all the kids that the computers tell us we’re supposed to have and then take the count downtown so that they can verify it.  It sounds simple, but with hundreds of kids in even a small building, that’s a lot of moving parts, and then you get kids on half-days and alternate schedules of some sort, and kids who “withdrew” but never actually withdrew, or kids who registered and haven’t actually shown up yet, and then there’s the occasional honest-to-god mistake, like the 7th grader who took me an hour to locate because she just plain didn’t have a first hour class in the computer, meaning that all the teachers’ count sheets added up to one less than the number of 7th graders that the computer said we had.

Anyway, the point of all this is that the numbers get submitted to the state and the state uses them to determine our funding levels for the rest of the year.  It also marks the day that the local charter and/or private schools start expelling the hell out of everyone that they don’t want around for ISTEP, loading the public schools up with behavior problems and/or students with special education needs that we won’t get funding for.

It’s wonderful.  I’ll bet money we get ten new kids in the next two weeks.