Crusading parent Terra Ziporyn Snider says that even her daughter hates her now.
The Severna Park Middle eighth-grader is only the latest one to blame Snider for the upheaval that is about to rock Anne Arundel County middle schools.
Come February, some 8,500 pupils, including Snider's daughter, will be tossed out of many of their favorite classes and enrolled in new ones they might not care for, such as physical education.
Teachers will have to take on courses they haven't been trained for. Recruiters will scramble to hire teachers for new classes. Administrators will spend months tearing up and redoing children's schedules.
And it will cost up to $3.7 million.
Snider is being blamed because she, along with other parents, went to the State Board of Education and pointed out that Anne Arundel middle schools weren't requiring pupils to take physical education and fine arts every year, as the state requires.
So the state board ordered the county school system in September to get all middle schoolers into physical education and fine arts by the second semester this year - forcing an unprecedented schedule shake-up.
"I don't see the tragedy if my eighth-grader has to spend 40 minutes every day doing gym," said Snider, chairwoman of the parents group Coalition for Balanced Equity in Education. "I despised gym, too, but when you look back on it, you realize it's for a good reason."
But to make it happen, to change the schedules of at least 8,500 students and almost every teacher midyear, is a job that middle school principals are calling a nightmare, a virtual impossibility and a harmful, disruptive event for children.
"Kids will be asked to adjust to new schedules, new teachers, new classes," said Principal Chris Truffer of Corkran Middle in Glen Burnie. "They'll be asked to take things they don't want. Such a situation could be devastating to the middle school child."
Reading was the goal
The 19 Anne Arundel County middle schools find themselves in a difficult place because they wanted their children to read more.
School officials noticed that Anne Arundel County fifth-graders scored above the state average on reading tests, but by eighth grade, pupils were scoring below the state average.
Something was going wrong in the middle schools, and it had to be fixed.
So the county school board voted in the spring to give all middle school pupils - starting with the sixth grade this fall - two reading periods every day.
