Back to School,
Tega Cay

The teachers are already back. Not the students, who get one more week of summer and are making the most of it. The teachers. Workdays started today and run through Friday, and then on Monday, August 3, the buses roll and the year begins for real.

There is something about that gap that gets me every year. A whole week of people setting up rooms nobody has walked into yet, labeling cubbies for children they have not met, and quietly bracing for the ten months ahead. It is the least visible week of the school year and probably one of the most important.

I spent two years in graduate school studying sociology, which is a long way of saying that I can no longer walk into a room without counting how people arrange themselves inside it. Occupational hazard. The idea that has stayed with me the longest comes from Ray Oldenburg: we each need a first place, which is home, and a second place, which is work, and then a third place, which is neither one. The third place is where you are not anybody’s parent and not anybody’s employee. You are just a person in a chair with something good in front of you.

Teachers have the strangest second place of anyone I know. Most of us go to work and spend the day surrounded by other adults who can, broadly speaking, manage their own shoes. Teachers go to work and spend seven hours surrounded by other people’s children, twenty-some at a time, every one of whom needs something right now. Then they go home to a first place where more people need things. Where more people need them.

So we are. That is the entire thought behind this, and I would rather say it plainly than dress it up.

Starting this week, teachers and school staff get 10% off at Maisie’s Green Brae, every day we are open. It covers you, your partner, and your wee bairns. (Yes, the flyer says wee bairns. We run a place called Green Brae. We were not going to pass that up.)

And I do mean school staff, not only the people with a classroom. The bus driver who knows every stop and every kid at every stop. The cafeteria team feeding hundreds of children in twenty-two minutes flat, which is a logistics operation I have genuine professional respect for. The custodian who gets the building ready before anyone arrives and closes it down after everyone leaves. The front office, which absorbs every phone call, every forgotten lunch, and every parent having a hard morning. Counselors. Aides. Coaches. If you work in a school, this is for you.

I grew up in a restaurant. My parents owned one, and a catering company with it, and I spent my childhood watching what it looks like to feed a community on purpose rather than by accident. I did not understand at the time that I was watching a craft. I thought I was just waiting for my dinner.

And all those years and the next twenty or so, I learned what it means to serve a community. Teachers do that every day, all day. Parents. Kids. Staff Members. State and Federal Regulations. So much taking care of others.

You serve our community. So we serve you.