The Front Counter

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The Front Counter
For whoever sits here next fall, and anybody else who sits at one

Every August some new attendance secretary somewhere sits down at a counter for the first time, the way I did in 1973, and nobody tells her a thing except where the forms are. The forms are the easy part. So here is what I would have liked somebody to tell me. They will hire my replacement this spring, and I intend to print this out and leave it in the top drawer.

Ten Things I Know

1. Be at the counter before the first bus. The first fifteen minutes are the whole day. If you are still taking your coat off when the first car rider comes through that door, you will be behind until three o'clock.

2. A mother who calls at 7:20 sounding sharp is not angry at you. She is scared, or she is late, or both. Lower your voice and she will lower hers. It works on fathers too, and on principals.

3. Learn the bus numbers. Learn which ones run late in the rain and which driver will radio in when a child didn't come out to the stop. Bus fourteen has run eight minutes late on every rainy morning since 1981, and I have never once marked a child tardy off of it.

4. Never read a note out loud. Not even a funny one. Especially not a funny one. Somebody's mother wrote that at the kitchen table with a baby on her hip. Save it for home, take off the name, and laugh at your own supper table if you have to.

5. The school nurse is your best friend. The head custodian is your second best. Between the three of you, you will know everything that happens in that building before the principal does, and you will keep nearly all of it to yourselves.

6. A child who is late every single day is telling you something. Find out what, quietly. Sometimes it is an alarm clock, and I have given away eleven alarm clocks over the years, in the box, no questions asked. Sometimes it is a little sister who has to be walked to the elementary school, or a mother who works the night shift and isn't home to wake anybody. A detention never fixed any of those.

7. The computer keeps the record. You keep the child. We went from the paper register to the computer in 1991, and the computer has never once known a single student by sight. It does not know which ones need a word in the morning. That is your job, and it isn't in the manual.

8. Smile at the ones who come in late with their heads down. Being late is punishment enough at sixteen. They don't need it from you too.

9. Keep your handwriting neat. You will be writing "Excused," "Unexcused" and your own initials something like a quarter of a million times. Make them initials you are proud of.

10. When you leave, leave the drawer stocked. See below.

What's in the Drawer
Top left drawer, front counter, as of this morning

Safety pins	About forty, all sizes, on a big one. Hems, straps, a zipper that gave up on the stairs. The most useful thing in the building.
Peppermints	The round red-and-white kind, a bag a week. For upset stomachs, hard conversations and boys who skipped breakfast. Not for teachers. They know where the bag is anyway.
A phone book	This year's Knoxville book, and last year's underneath it, for the families who changed their number and forgot to tell us.
Needle and thread	Black, white and navy. Buttons come off on picture day. They just do.
A clip-on tie	Also for picture day. Navy blue, goes with anything. It has been in more yearbooks than I have.
Quarters	A roll, for the pay phone in the front hall. Nobody should have to stand there with no way to call home.
A hairbrush	Still in the package. When one gets used, I buy another.
Tissues	Two boxes. The front office sees more crying than the guidance office does, I promise you, and it's mostly the mothers.
An alarm clock	In the box, wind-up, so it works when the power doesn't. See number 6 above.
Index cards	For the good parts. You'll see.
Rubber bands, emery boards, hand lotion, a lint roller and reading glasses from the drugstore	The reading glasses are mine. Everything else in that drawer belongs to whoever needs it.

What I'll Miss, and What I Won't

I won't miss: the office copier, which has jammed on every important morning since Nixon; the telephone at 7:15 on the first snowy day of the year; or standing out in the parking lot with my clipboard for a fire drill in February.

I will miss: seniors who stop by the counter in May to say they were late two hundred times and thank you for never once making a fuss. Freshmen who think I am a teacher and call me "ma'am" for four years. Mothers who say "Carol, you won't believe this one," and they're right, I don't, and I admit him anyway. And the mornings, all of them, even the wrong ones.

My husband says I'll be back at that counter by October of next year as a volunteer. He may be right. He usually is, though I would never put that in writing.

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Last updated Tuesday, September 21, 1999